I     Millions  of  Idle 

|  Acres 

§ 


1 


Written  by 
P.  S.  LOVEJOY, 

Of   the    University   of   Michigan   Forestry    Faculty; 

and 
FRED  E.  JANETTE, 

Of  The  Detroit   News  Staff. 


| 

| 

Series  of  Articles  Published  in  The  Detroit 
News,  May  24- June  4. 

Published  by  The  Detroit  News',  June,  1920. 

|iii» -. 

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Main  Lfbrr    ' 


While  the  world  suff 'ers  from  a  shortage  of  'fore ft, products,  millions  of 
acres  of  Michigan  land  that  once  yielded  vast  iffio[tJl  ^Ainber'^y^today 
•waste  lands,  fire-swept  and  deteriorating  year  by  year,  Fpryjard-Jojoking,  men 
who  are  wrestling  with  the  problem  belie-ve  ihoA>'tJie\beoffie*&f/^icjtigaw  up 
not  realize  the  gravity  of  the  situation  or  the  possibility  of  remedy.  Their 
plan  is  to  restore  to  the  wasted  areas  of  this  state  the  forest  industry. 

The  series  of  articles  to  follow  will  present  a  study  of  the  causes  and  con- 
ditions creating  Michigan's  waste  areas  in  the  northern  part  of  the  state, 
and  give  an  account  of  what  is  being  done  to  restore  them  to  use. 

P.  S«  Lovejoy,  who  contributes  the  first  article  of  the  series,  is  a  member 
of  the  University  of  Michigan  forestry  faculty,  a  scientist  and  a  practical 
woodsman  of  long  experience. 


By  P.  S.  LOVEJOY 

Of  the  Forestry  Faculty,  University  of  Michigan. 

A  third  of  Michigan  virtually  is  bankrupt,  unable  to  pay  its  way  with 
schools  and  roads,  getting  poorer  instead  of  richer  from  year  to  year, 
producing  less  and  less  of  value. 

This  third  of  Michigan  takes  10,000,000  acres  or  so,  the  most  of  it 
being  in  the  northern  part  of  the  Lower  Peninsula,  the  rest  in  the 
Upper  Peninsula. 

The  bulk  of  these  bankrupt  lands  were  originally  in  pine  forest. 
From  1870  to  1900  Michigan  led  the  world  in  the  quantity,  quality  and 
value  of  its  timber  exports.  Today  Michigan  is  a  tremendous  importer 
of  timber  and  other  forest  products.  This  is  unusual  but  not  in  itself  a 
proof  that  anything  is  radically  wrong.  Ohio,  also,  was  covered  origin- 
ally with  timber  and  is  now  a  great  timber  importer,  and  is,  neverthe- 
less, prosperous  and  thriving. 

LAND  GOES  TO  DISUSE. 

But  in  the  case  of  Ohio,  the  removal  of  the  forests  was  followed 
promptly  by  intensive  agricultural  development;  the  land  went  from  a 
lower  to  a  higher  kind  of  use.  In  Michigan  the  removal  of  the  orig- 
inal forests  has  not  been  followed  by  any  other  profitable  use  of  the 
land  save  on  about  two-thirds  of  the  state,  the  balance  of  the  land,  being 
today  non-productive  and  "waste."  The  bulk  of  these  idle  lands  has 
been  deserted  and  has  been  non-productive  for  upward  of  20  years  and 
there  is  no  accident  about  it.  Most  of  the  idle  lands  are  sandy  and  poor. 
As  a  rule,  pine  follows  the  sands  as  willows  follow  the  creeks. 

If  Iowa  were  to  be  forced  to  import  corn  from  New  York  or  if 
California  sent  to  Florida  for  oranges,  it  would  be  no  more  preposterous 
than  to  have  Michigan,  with  10,000,000  acres  of  idle  stump  land,  import- 
ing great  quantities  of  forest  products.  We  do  that. 

Michigan-grown  hemlock,  shipped  200  miles,  sells  at  the  same  price 
in  Detroit  as  does  fir  grown  on  the  Pacific  Coast  and  shipped  2,000 
miles.  The  hickory  for  the  wheels  of  Michigan  automobiles  is  coming 
from  Arkansas  and  Mississippi.  The  oak  for  Grand  Rapids  furniture  is 
being  cut  in  Louisiana  and  Tennessee.  Michigan  does  not  even  supply 
itself  with  enough  telephone  poles  and  railroad  ties,  but  imports  poles 
from  Idaho  and  ties  from  Virginia. 

450960 


TIMBER-EXPORTS  GROW. 

Much  of  the  paper  on  which  our  newspapers  are  being  .printed  is 
made  from  Canadian  spruce.  Box-boards  are  being  shipped  in  from 
PentfSy^temia  &n4 : Ar^ajisas  and  California.  The  state  imports  much 
more'lffnfcer  th£fi  il  Se'uls-and  cuts  much  more  timber  than  it  grows,  con- 
stanjly  grows,  a.rjdl  .cuts  less  and  constantly  imports  more. 
."The£  fijeigfci  frill;  On  ^mp'or^ted  lumber  alone  is  costing  Michigan  around 
$2,000;000'a'year,  'a'htf/e'a'ch'y'ear  the  freight  bill  is  due  to  increase  great- 
ly as  the  sources  of  supply  recede  with  the  steady  devastation  of  the 
forests  of  the  South  and  West.  Meanwhile  Michigan  continues  to  sup- 
port 10,000,000  acres  or  so  of  idle  lands  which  a  few  years  ago  were 
producing  the  most  generally  useful  kinds  of  timber  the  world  ever 
had.  White  pine  lumber  practically  is  out  of  the  market.  There  is 
not  a  town  of  5,000  in  the  state  which  does  not  import  yellow  pine 
from  the  Gulf  states. 

On  the  face  of  things,  such  economic  arrangements  do  not  appear 
very  reasonable,  but  they  are  easy  to  account  for.  If  we  could  get 
the  timber  we  needed  from  the  neighbors,  and  at  easy  prices,  why 
bother  with  growing  timber  and  why  fuss  about  the  situation? 

SUPPLY  DECREASES. 

Perhaps  that  might  be  an  all  right  way  of  doing  save  for  one  item — 
the  neighbor's  supply  of  timber  is  not  holding  out. 

Withing  the  lifetime  of  many  persons  now  living,  the  center  of  the 
lumber  industry  has  moved  from  the  New  England  country  to  Pennsyl- 
vania, to  the  Lake  states,  to  the  Gulf  states.  The  Southern  Pine  Asso- 
ciation reports  that  within  10  years  3,000  big  sawmills  will  be  junked 
and  cut  out  and  gone,  and  that  the  cut  of  Southern  pine  must  drop 
about  50  per  cent.  That  leaves  us  the  virgin  forests  of  the  Pacific  Coast. 
The  United  States  Bureau  of  Corporations  recently  made  a  very  elab- 
orate check  on  the  timber  left  in  the  United  States  and  gives  us  60 
years  to  use  up  all  the  log  timber  at  the  present  rates  of  consumption. 
That's  only  long  enough  to  grow  a  really  nice  set  of  whiskers.  Already 
the  Pacific  Coast  timber,  with  a  two  or  three  thousand-mile  haul,  is  to 
be  found  in  all  the  larger  towns  of  the  East.  So  the  lumber  industry 
has  made  its  last  jump. 

HERE  IS  CHOICE. 

When  the  Coast  timber  begins  to  run  short,  in  20  years  or  so,  we 
can  take  our  pick  between  Russian  timber  and  Amazon  timber,  or  we 
can  do  without  timber.  If  we  do  not  care  for  those  alternatives,  of 
course  we  can  grow  some  more  timber,  and  pulp  wood,  and  cooperage 
and  box  stuff,  and  trees  to  yield  turpentine  and  rosin  and  tannic  acid 
and  acetic  acid  and  wood  alcohol  and  charcoal  and  rifle  butts  and  air- 
plane propellers  and  lead  pencils  and  clothes  pins  and  ax  handles  and 
bridge  timbers  and  railroad  ties  and  such  other  items  as  seem  useful 
to  have  around  in  generous  quantities,  when  and  where  needed,  and 
which  come  from  the  forests  and  from  no  place  else. 

Whenever  we  get  ready  we  can  grow  all  the  timber  we  want.  Grow- 
ing timber  is  a  simple  affair.  All  you  have  to  do  is  to  stick  a  little 
tree  into  the  right  sort  of  ground  and  wait. 

PROCESS  OF  PLANTING. 

If  you  want  pine  or  spruce  trees,  and  if  you  do  not  want  to  depend 
on  luck,  first  you  get  the  fresh  cones  from  the  trees  and  take  out  the 


seed.  Then  you  put  the  seed  where  it  will  be  happy  and  in  a  couple 
of  years  you  have  a  pine  or  spruce  tree  as  long  as  your  little  finger.  - 
Then  you  pick  out  the  ground  to  set  it  in,  and  that  is  easier  than  with 
some  other  plants.  You  can't  look  at  a  field  and  tell  just  how  good  a 
place  it  is  for  buckwheat  or  timothy,  but  if  you  have  a  piece  of  land 
covered  with  big  old  pine  and  spruce  stumps,  you  dont'  have  to  be  a 
soil  chemist  to  find  out  whether  pine  or  spruce  will  grow  again  where 
they  have  once  done  well. 

But  one  does  not  like  to  use  rose  ground  for  sunflowers  or  corn 
ground  for  buckwheat.  Each  crop  belongs  in  its  place.  We  could 
raise  a  lot  of  very  fine  cottonwood  in  the  corn  belt  country,  but  we 
never  will.  Each  crop  should  go  into  its  appointed  place.  If  we  want 
to  raise  timber  we  ought  to  find  out  where  it  can  be  grown  to  the  best 
advantage,  everything  considered.  That  is  a  very  simple  matter. 

MANY  ACRES  OF  "WASTE." 

Michigan,  for  instance,  has  something  over  10,000,000  acres  of  idle 
land  which  once  grew  fine  pine,  but  which  is  now  idle  land.  Wisconsin 
and  Minnesota  have  twice  as  much  of  that  land  as  has  Michigan. 
Georgia  has  20,000,000  acres,  and  a  dozen  other  states  have  from 
5,000,000  to  15,000,000  acres  each  of  idle,  cut-over,  logged-off,  non- 
productive, "waste"  land. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  we  have  so  much  idle  former  forest  land  that  it 
has  become  embarrassing.  Germany  is  bigger  than  France,  and  Texas 
is  bigger  than  Germany.  If  you  blocked  up  the  cut-over  forest  lands 
of  the  United  States  and  put  them  down  over  Texas,  they  would  cover 
that  sizable  state  and  thousands  of  square  miles  would  stick  out  over 
the  edges.  If  you  wanted  to  survey  those  cut-over  lands  and  cross 
each  square  mile  once,  and  had  an  airplane,  and  made  100  miles  an 
hour,  and  traveled  10  hours  a  day,  your  trip  would  take  you  the  greater 
part  of  a  year. 

TIME  IS  A  FACTOR. 

So  there  isn't  any  difficulty  about  finding  a  suitable  place  to  grow 
timber  if  ever  we  decide  we  want  to  do  such  a  thing.  Whenever  we 
get  ready  we  can  get  the  seed  and  the  ground  is  waiting,  and  that  is 
all  there  is  to  it  except  the  matter  of  time  which  is  required  between 
planting  and  harvest.  A  tree  takes  its  own  time  about  growing,  and 
no  amount  of  urgency  or  money  can  hurry  it  up  very  much.  But  we 
know  how  fast  the  different  species  grow  under  different  conditions, 
and  we  know  how  long  we  will  have  to  wait  in  order  to  harvest  pulp 
wood  or  ax  handles  or  bridge  timbers.  The  average  tree  from  which 
our  common  lumber  is  coming  is  around  250  years  old.  Most  of  our 
paper  is  made  from  spruce,  and  the  average  spruce  cut  for  pulp  is  over 
100  years  old.  But,  by  matching  the  right  species  to  the  right  soil,  and 
helping  out  here  and  there,  we  know  how  to  get  a  right  decent  sawlog 
in  100  years  or  even  less,  and  we  know  how  to  grow  a  very  satisfactory 
kind  of  pulp  wood  in  less  than  50  years. 

TIME  TO  START  FORESTS. 

Considering  all  these  things,  it  would  seem  that  the  only  important 
thing  left  was  to  determine  whether  we  wanted  to  begin  raising  timber 
as  a  crop,  and  if  so,  just  when.  And  if  the  Bureau  of  Corporations  is 
right  in  saying  that  our  old  virgin  sawlog  timber  will  be  gone  at  the 
present  rate  of  consumption  in  60  years,  and  if  it  is  true  that  the  pulp 

—5— 


mills  are  so  short  of  spruce  that  they  are  moving  into  Canada,  and  if 
it  is  true  that  the  Canadian  authorities  report  that  they  are  finding  out 
that  they  have  very  much  less  spruce  than  they  thought,  and  if  it  takes 
at  least  100  years  to  make  sawlogs  and  some  50  years  to  make  good 
pulp  wood,  it  might  seem  advisable  to  do  a  little  something  in  the  way 
of  starting  new  forests  in  the  fairly  near  future,  as  it  were.  But  one 
should  go  rat'her  slow  with  radical  innovations,  of  course,  and  look  be- 
fore he  leaps  and  not  do  anything  foolish  and  not  get  run  off  his  feet  by 
sentimental  considerations,  and  be  calm  and  take  it  easy  and  rather 
look  out  for  log-haired  theorists — and  that  is  just  what  we  have  been 
doing. 

PINE  NEARLY  OFF  MARKET. 

While  we  have  been  taking  it  easy  the  undisputed  fact  has  developed 
that  hemlock  lumber  costs  around  $60  a  thousand  feet  in  Michigan  and 
that  white  pine  is  practically  off  trie  market;  that  Michigan  has  more 
than  10,000,000  acres  of  idle  former  forest  land  and  a  constantly  grow- 
ing freight  bill  on  imported  lumber;  that  the  pulp  mills  are  moving  to 
Canada;  that  we  are  the  most  generous  users  of  forest  products  in  the 
world;  that  France  and  Germany  have  for  centuries  kept  about  a  fourth 
of  their  entire  land  area  in  productive  forests  and  still  have  been  forced 
to  import  more  and  more  timber — and  that,  within  50  years,  in  spite  of 
anything  we  can  now  do,  we  shall  be  down  to  a  per  capita  consumption 
of  timber  no  greater  than  that  to  which  France  and  Germany  have  be- 
come adjusted  through  many  centuries  and  with  which  they  are  barely 
able  to  maintain  their  industries. 

Really,  the  only  question  is:  Will  it  take  hemlock  lumber  at  $100  a 
thousand  feet  and  news  print  at  10  cents  a  pound  to  get  us  started? 
Nothing  now  can  prevent  such  prices  except  the  starting  of  new  for- 
ests which  can  come  into  maturity  so  as  to  fill  the  great  timber  deficit 
which  will  be  evident  enough  within  50  years. 

WARNING  RIDICULED. 

There  is  nothing  at  all  new  about  all  these  things.  Thirty-five  years 
ago  Dr.  Spaulding,  at  the  University  of  Michigan,  had  it  figured  out 
that  it  would  be  well  to  keep  Michigan's  pine  lands  at  work.  He  was 
laughed  at.  Practical  people,  especially  the  lumbermen,  informed  him 
that  there  was  "enough  pine  in  Michigan  to  last  forever" — and  believed 
it,  too.  Twenty  years  ago  Charles  Garfield,  of  Grand  Rapids,  saw 
what  was  coming  and  tried  to  get  something  dpne,  and  was  laughed 
at.  Practical  people,  especially  the  lumbermen,  stated  that  it  was  a 
well-known  fact  that  "pine  would  not  follow  pine."  Fifteen  years  ago 
Prof.  Roth  told  the  state  officials  that  if  they  would  let  him  run  the 
tax-reverted  state  lands  he  would  make  them  pay  and  could  build  them 
up  into  properties  which  would  yield  a  fair  rate  of  interest  on  a  valua- 
tion of  $50  an  acre.  For  this  he  was  called  names  and  some  of  the 
newspapers  had  a  lot  of  fun  about  it — print  paper  then  being  easy  to 
get  and  not  worth  4  cents  a  pound. 

NOTHING  BEING  DONE. 

So  things  have  run  along-  in  the  good  old  way  and  now  we  are 
caught  short,  and  good  old  Michigan  has  a  third  of  her  acres  out  of 
a  job  and  getting  poorer,  year  by  year.  And  still  nobody  is  doing 
much  of  anything  about  it  all.  It's  just  as  well  to  be  practical,  you 
know. 

—6— 


If  you  travel  around  the  state  and  ask  questions,  the  chances  are 
that  almost  everybody  you  meet  will  agree  that  it  would  be  a  right 
good  idea  for  somebody  to  start  in  growing  some  timber  as  a  sort 
of  regular  crop.  If  you  ask  where  it  would  be  practicable  to  begin, 
probably  you  would  be  told  that  the  Government  was  doing  something 
or  other  out  West.  Weren't  there  national  forests  or  something? 
Haven't  we  a  state  forest  some  place  up-state?  There  are  and  we 
have.  But  of  all  the  timber  left  in  the  United  States  less  than  15  per 
cent  is  on  the  national  forests,  and  of  all  the  timber  cut  last  year  less 
than  3  per  cent  came  from  the  national  forests,  the  balance  being 
from  privately  owned  forests. 

RAGGED  LITTLE  PATCHES. 

And  the  state  forests  of  Michigan  consist  of  ragged  little  patches  of 
country  so  thoroughly  logged  off  and  so  burned  over  that  the  owners 
quit  paying  taxes  on  them.  Altogether,  the  state  forests  aggregate  a 
fraction  of  a  million  acres  and  the  state  has  a  full  10,000,000  acres  of 
idle  lands  not  in  the  state  forests.  So  the  existing  Federal  and  state 
forests  are  not  going  to  help  very  soon  or  very  much. 

If  you  inquire  you  will  find  that  the  bulk  of  the  idle  lands  are  owned 
by  lumbermen  or  former  lumbermen.  If  you  look  sharply  you  may 
discover  that  it  is  written  into  the  Washington  records  that  some  30-odd 
concerns  "own"  some  6,000,000  acres  of  Michigan — a  sixth  of  the  state. 
If  you  interview  some  of  these  concerns  and  ask  how  they  managed  to 
pick  up  so  much  land  you  will  not  be  treated  with  courtesy.  If  you 
ask  what  they  propose  to  do  with  so  much  land  you  will  be  told  that  it 
is  none  of  your  business.  If  you  ask  why  they  prefer  idle  and  non- 
productive land  to  land  covered  with  growing  timber  you  will  be  sneered 
at  and  told  about  the  fires.  If  you  ask  why  they  don't  keep  the  fires 
out  you  will  get  an  impatient  answer  to  the  effect  that  fire  and  idle 
brush  land  go  together  as  do  fleas  and  a  dog — and  that,  anyway,  it  is 
up  to  the  state  to  keep  out  the  fires. 

WHAT  STATE  SAYS. 

If  you  ask  about  it  at  Lansing  y.ou  will  find  out  that  the  game  war- 
den is  also  the  fire  warden;  that  he  reports  to  the  Public  Domain  Com- 
mission, and  that  the  Public.  Domain  Commission  feels  very  strongly 
that  fires  are  quite  a  misfortune  in  the  state.  The  secretary  of  the 
Public  Domain  Commission  is  also  immigration  commissioner,  and, 
if  you  ask,  he  will  give  you  some  nicely  illustrated  literature  concerning 
the  wonderful  agricultural  possibilities  of  the  cut-over  country,  concern- 
ing further  details  of  which  you  are  referred  to  the  state  geologist  and 
the  Agricultural  College. 

If  you  want  to  make  a  nuisance  of  yourself  and  travel  further 
around  the  spiral  the  state  geologist  will  tell  you  that  he  has  nothing 
like  a  soil  survey  of  the  idle  lands;  that  he  would  like  to  have  and 
regrets  that  he  has  not  and,  therefore,  that  he  can  not,  unfortunately, 
furnish  the  details  concerning  which  you  ask. 

DETAILS  ARE  SCARCE. 

Then  you  can  try  the  Agricultural  College  and  the  folks  there  will 
also  regret  that  no  real  soil  survey  has  ever  been  made;  that  detailed 
information  concerning  the  location,  nature,  value  an.d  possibilities  of 

—7— 


the  cut-over  country  is  rather  scant,  and  that  they  would  be  perfectly 
delighted  if  someone  would  get  something  done  about  it,  and  why  not 
find  out  just  what  it  was  that  happened  to  the  Soil  Survey  Law  which 
passed  the  Legislature  a  couple  of  years  back? 

Back  at  the  State  House  you  will  be  told  that  there  was  such  an 
act,  that  it  was  passed  by  the  Legislature  and  signed  by  the  Governor, 
and  then,  as  a  measure  of  war  economy,  something  happened  which 
let  the  appropriation  lapse,  and  why  not  ask  about  that  at  the 
Governor's  office? 

CASE  OF  BANKRUPTCY. 

Put  it  in  common  business  talk  and  it  comes  out  clearer.  What  is 
the  essential  nature  of  the  case?  Why,  it's  a  case  of  bankruptcy; 
some  millions  of  acres  of  land  do  not  pay  enough  in  taxes  to  cover 
the  cost  of  assessing  and  collecting  the  taxes  and  attending  to  the 
administrative  routine.  The  owners  and  the  interested  parties  do  not 
seem  to  be  able  to  fix  things  up.  Creditors  are  getting  uneasy.  What's 
to  be  done  in  a  case  like  that?  Oh,  get  a  receiver  appointed. 

All  right,  now  we  have  a  receiver.  What  will  be  do?  The  very 
first  thing  will  be  to  stop  the  wasting  of  assets.  Then  he  will  'have  a 
full  inventory  made.  Then,  having  found  out  just  what  he  has  on 
his  hands,  having  located  liabilities  and  assets,  he  can  proceed  to  plan 
things  so  as  to  wind  up  the  concern  or  get  it  on  its  feet  again. 

Our  receiver  will  find  that  to  stop  the  wasting  of  assets  it  a  real 
job.  The  biggest  item  will  be  in  getting  rid  of  the  fires.  If  it  had  not 
been  for  the  fires  all  those  idle  acres  would  today  be  producing  timber — 
good  timber  and  lots  of  it;  the  lands  would  have  stayed  productive  if 
it  had  not  been  for  the  fires. 

CARELESSNESS  IS  CAUSE. 

To  keep  fires  out  of  a  forest  country  is  not  easy,  but  still  it  is  simple 
enough.  First  you  must  prevent  them  from  getting  started  if  possible. 
About  95  per  cent  of  all  fires  are  due  to  carelessness.  To  cure  that 
sort  of  carelessness  requires  large  doses  of  skillfully  administered  pub- 
licity— an  advertising  campaign.  Also  a  little  law  enforcement.  A 
little  law  enforcement  would  increase  the  publicity,  too.  Matter  of 
novelty  and  surprise  generates  interest,  as  it  were.  A  lot  of  the  fires 
could  be  prevented  from  starting. 

But  some  fires  will  start  in  spite  of  all  one  could  do.  The  job  of 
putting  them  out  is  simple  enough.  The  first  thing  is  to  have  a  system 
of  lookouts  and  patrolmen  which  can  detect  the  presence  of  a  fire 
within  a  few  minutes  of  its  start,  get  its  exact  location,  and  report  the 
facts  to  headquarters.  Headquarters  then  sizes  up  the  situation  and 
sends  a  competent  crew  equipped  adequately  so  as  to  get  it  to  the  site 
of  the  fire  within  an  hour  or  so  after  the  fire  first  showed  up.  The  crew 
then  puts  out  the  fire,  or  if  it  can't,  that  fact  is  reported  back  swiftly 
and  reinforcements  come  in  a-flying. 

WHAT  ABOUT  COST? 

If  the  receiver  for  the  bankrupt  part  of  Michigan  has  all  this  ex- 
plained to  him  he  will  begin  to  be  doubtful.  "All  very  well,"  he  will 
say,  "but  what  about  the  cost  of  all  t'hose  roads  and  trails  and  lookouts 
and  telephone  lines  and  tools  and  what-not?  How  could  I  ever  justify 
such  expenses?" 


"By  preventing  the  wasting  of  assets,"  he  will  be  told.  "It  s  cost- 
ing you  a  whole  lot  more  right  now,  in  losses,  than  it  would  to  prevent 
those  losses.  Sooner  or  later,  ev-ery  acre  of  all  that  idle  country  is 
going  to  be  put  to  profitable  work.  It  will  be  made  to  grow  something. 
Maybe  farm  crops,  maybe  forage  crops,  maybe  timber  crops,  but  all 
of  them  depending  on  the  soil.  The  better  the  soil  t'he  better  the  crops 
and  the  other  way  around,  too.  Now  fire  destroys  the  organic  mat- 
ter in  the  soil,  and  that  means  the  humus  and  the  nitrogen.  Nitrogen 
is  already  the  limiting  factor  in  most  of  our  soils.  And  a  common 
every-summer  fire  running  over  fresh-cut  forest  or  virgin  forest,  will 
burn  up  organic  material  containing  nitrogen  that  would  cost  you,  on 
the  market,  around  a  hundred  dollars  and  up.  Every  succeeding  fire 
takes  a  little  more  and,  finally,  just  about  every  bit  of  it. 

FERTILITY  BURNED  OUT. 

"That's  the  biggest  reason  these  lands  are  idle  and  why  so  many 
millions  of  acres  are  worthless  for  farming.  Fertility  has  been  burned 
out.  To  prevent  that  will  be  worth  vastly  more  than  the  cost  of  stop- 
ping fires. 

"Or  you  could  justify  it  another  way.  Figure  the  cost  of  replacing 
the  young  trees  burned  up.  Take  the  extra  low  costs  of  raising  and 
planting  trees  on  the  State  Forests  and  apply  that  to  the  number  of 
good  young  trees  that  burn  and  it  runs  into  millions  of  dollars  every 
year  or  so.  The  fires  have  killed  out  most  of  the  pines  and  ot'her 
good  trees,  but  they  keep  trying  to  get  back  and,  with  half  a  chance, 
a  lot  of  the  country  would  go  back  into  pulp  and  log  timber  in  just  a 
few  years.  To  prevent  fire  losses  in  young  timber  would  justify  the 
cost  of  stopping  fire. 

"Or  figure  it  out  on  another  basis.  What  is  the  north  country  worth 
for  recreation  purposes?  How  much  money  do  people  spend  in  order 
to  get  into  a  cool  and  pleasant  green  land  where  there  is  good  fis'hing 
and  hunting  and  a  fine  place  to  play? 

FIGURE  TOURIST  BILL. 

"Add  up  the  money  spent  for  railroad  fares  and  automobile  traffic 
and  in  hotel  bills  and  in  building  and  maintaining  summer  homes, 
and  the  business  developed  for  summer  tourist  traffic  and  from  hunt- 
ing and  fishing  and  trapping,  and  what's  the  gross?  If  it  were  so  low 
as  $15,000,000  a  year,  that  would  be  about  a  dollar  an  acre  for  all  the 
idle  land  and  the  good  land  in  the  north  part  of  the  state.  But  how 
much  tourist  and  summer  traffic  will  develop  in  a  country  full  of 
black  stumps  and  scraggy  brush  and  smoke,  where  one  never  knows 
when  it  is  safe  to  take  a  side  road  or  when  his  camp  may  be  burned 
out  or  how  often  fire  will  burn  over  his  favorite  hunting  and  fishing 
grounds?  To  stop  the  fires  would  be  a  good  investment  on  this  count 
alone." 

"Well,  that  sounds  all  rig'ht,"  the  receiver  might  say,  "but  what 
would  it  cost  to  stop  the  fires?" 

The  answer  to  that  would  be  that  5  cents  an  acre  a  year  would  do  it 
if  it  were  properly  spent.  If  that  runs  up  into  a  lot  more  money  than 
has  been  spent  for  fire-fighting  in  the  past  it  is  because,  while  we 
have  had  some  fire-fighting,  we  have  never  had  fire  protection. 

MIGHT  GET   OLD   ACT. 

If  the  receiver  we  have  supposed  to  be  appointed  for  the  bankrupt 
area  of  Michigan  were  a  long-headed  receiver,  after  checking  things 
over  a  while,  probably  he  would  decide:  "It  would  be  worth  it,  but  we 

—9— 


could  never  put  it  over  without  more  backing  than  we  could  expect 
to  get — unless  .  .  Wonder  if  the  newspaper  could  be  made  to  see  this?"1 
Suppose  the  price  of  newsprint  went  on  up  to  five  cents  and  then 
seven  cents  a  pound  iand  the  newspapers  did  see  it  and  the  fire  job 
was  really  taken  hold  of  and  was  working  out,  the  receiver's  next  job 
would  be  to  get  an  inventory  of  his  layout.  Maybe  he  could  get  again 
into  life  the  old  act  that  passed  the  Legislature  and  received  the  Gov- 
ernor's signature  and  then  died.  Then  there  would  be  crews  out  in 
the  brush,  running  lines,  taking  soil  samples,  mapping  the  old  timber 
and  the  young  timber  and  the  brush  areas  and  the  farm  and  grazing 
lands  and  generally  taking  stock  of  what  there  is  in  the  shop. 

GOOD   FARMING  LAND, 

When  the  reports  came  in  and  were  worked  up,  the  receiver  could 
open  a  tract-book  and  say:  "There's  9,000  acres  of  really  good  land 
which,  right  now,  as  things  are,  could  be  farmed  profitably.  Ought  to 
be  farmed.  Jake,  look  up  this  tract  and  find  out  why  it  isn't  being 
farmed  and  dope  me  out  a  good  scheme  of  getting  the  right  folks  on 
that  land  right  away." 

Or  it  might  be  grazing  land  which,  as  things  are  right  now,  is  un- 
doutedlyx capable  of  supporting  a  profitable  grazing  development.  The 
receiver  could  proceed  to  get  that  unit  to  work. 

When  a  lot  of  the  really  first-class  tracts  were  being  settled  there 
would  be  time  to  figure  out  what  to  do  with  the  balance  of  the  propery. 
Some  of  it  would,  obviously,  be  worth  more  for  growing  timber  than 
for  anything  else.  The  land  classification  would  indicate  just  where 
such  lands  were  located  and  just  what  condition  they  were  in.  The 
receiver  could  turn  such  lands  over  to  somebody  who  understood  that 
sort  of  work. 

INVENTORY  COMPLETE. 

Finally,  there  would  be  left  a  lot  of  land  of  dubious  character;  not 
of  a  quality  or  area  or  location  to  permit  a  profitable  agricultural  or 
profitable  grazing  development  now,  as  things  actually  are,  and  still, 
perhaps  or  probably,  useful  for  such  purposes  in  the  future.  Maybe 
some  land  would  need  drainage,  other  land  might  be  all  right,  but  too 
expensive  to  clear,  other  land  just  beyond  the  edge  of  profitable  use  in 
agriculture  because  of  soil  conditions. 

With  those  lands  the  receiver  could  take  his  time,  being  very  busy 
putting  real  settlers  -on  real  farm  lands  and  real  timber  on  real  timber 
lands.  He  could  take  his  time  about  the  balance  of  the  lands  of  dubious 
character.  H[e  might  find  ways  of  working  them  into  use  or  he  might 
let  them  lie  idle,  or  he  might  turn  them  into  timber  producers  pending 
the  time  they  might  become  more  useful  for  something  else.  Anyway, 
having  his  inventory,  he  would  know  what  he  had,  the  condition  it  was 
in  and  what  he  would  have  to  do  to  get  all  his  property  to  work. 

STEPS  TOWARD  INVENTORY. 

All  of  which  is  a  nice  little  picture  but  nothing  but  "dope." 
And  that  is  the  way  things  stacked  up  until  this  spring.  In  April 
there  was  a  meeting  of  the  Michigan  Academy  of  Science  and  a  special 
session  devoted  to  the  discussion  of  these  affairs.  The  resolutions 
finally  adopted  called  for  the  reinstatement  of  the  soil  and  economy 
survey  of  appropriation  and  an  amendment  of  the  original  law  so  as 
to  provide  an  expert  Board  of  Control  to  advise  with  the  State 
Geologist  as  to  the  best  ways  of  running  such  a  survey.  So  far  so 

—10— 


good;  steps  have  been  taken  looking  toward  a  real  inventory  of  our 
state's  lands. 

But  to  complete  such  a  job  properly  will  take  years  and  years,  and 
in  the  meantime  settlers  are  settling,  assessors  are  assessing,  ^tourists 
are  touring,  fires  are  burning,  forests  are  disappearing  and  a  'third  of 
the  state  loafs  in  desolation.  There  are  those,  perhaps,  who,  hesitating 
over  the  prospects,  may  recommend  that  nothing  be  done  until  the 
big  inventory  job  is  all  complete.  A  good  excuse  for  doing  nothing 
can  always  find  a  welcome  home,  but  not  that  excuse  for  this  occasion. 

MAPS  TO  BE  AVAILABLE. 

It  was  reported  at  the  Academy  of  Science  meeting  that  .a  set  of 
maps  was  already  in  existence,  which,  with  a  little  editing,  would 
serve  excellently  as  a  stop-gap  between  the  almost  total  lack  of 
information  under  which  we  now  labor,  and  the  final  completion  of  the 
big-job  inventory.  Those  maps  will  shortly  be  made  available,  no 
doubt. 

According  to  the  Academy  of  Science,  the  most  urgent  step  in 
any  program  calculated  to  put  all  the  state's  acres  to  permanent  and 
profitable  work  is  the  stopping  of  the  fires.  This  can  be  done:  is 
perfectly  practicable,  said  the  Academy.  This  is  the  job  of  the  Public 
Domain  Commission,  and  it  is  up  to  the  Commission"  to  get  after 
the  job  in  the  very  near  future,  said  the  Academy.  All  of  which  is 
just  more  "dope,"  perhaps. 

BIG  TREE  NURSERY. 

To  be  sure,  the  forest  rangers  on  the  National  Forests  are  catching 
fires  while  they  are  little,  and  putting  up  their  lookouts  and  telephone 
lines  and  working  their  heliographs  and  caching  their  fire-tools  along 
the  trails  and  making  arrests  when  somebody  gets  inexcusably  careless 
with  fire  in  the  woods,  and,  of  course,  up  at  the  State  Forest  near 
Grayling,  the  state  forester  is  putting  tractor-plowed  fire  lines  about 
his  plantations,  and  keeping  out  the  fire  in  spite  of  the*  fact  that  the 
counry  all  around  him  burns  over  every  little  while.  And,  of  course, 
he  is  running  one  of  the  biggest  forest  tree  nurseries  in  the  world  and 
planting  millions  of  little  pines  on  the  poor  old  lumbered-over. 
burned-off,  tax-reverted  "waste"  lands  of  the  state,  and  making  them 
grow  right  along  as  nicely  as  can  be.  even  though  the  lumberman 
knew  that  "pine  would  not  follow  pine." 

An.d,  to  be  sure,  the  secretary  of  one  of  the  development  associations 
says  that  "Wisconsin  is  getting  ten  good  settlers  to  Michigan's  one. 
Wisconsin  has  a  real  soil  survey  and  acts  as  though  she  wanted  to 
get  settlers,  whereas  Michigan — but  what's  the  use?" 

PLAYING  IT  SAFE. 

Seeing  that  things  are  as  they  are,  and  that  we  are  practical  people, 
not  visionary;  with  our  fee-t  on  the  ground;  progressive,  to  be  sure, 
but  not  carried  away  by  theories  and  radical  notions;  playing  it  safe 
and  sound,  rather  than  fussing  about  the  hypothetical  future,  the  mere 
fact  that  a  third  of  Michigan,  10,000,000  acres  or  so,, is  idle,  barren,  fire- 
spent,  getting  poorer  and  more  desolate,  is  nothing  of  any  particular 
importance.  Hemlock  lumber  is  only  $60  a  thousand  and  newsprint 
only  4  cents  a  pound.  If,  for  any  reason,  the  future  should  bring,  hem- 
lock to  $100  a  thousand  and  newsprint  to  10  cents  per  pound,  why, 
then,  if  it  seems  an  appropriate  thing  to  do,  the  matter  may  receive 
adequate  attention.  Or  it  may  not.  Timber  is  a  long-time  crop  and 
l\o  degree  of  urgency  and  no  amount  of  money  can  hurry  it  to  maturity. 

-u- 


(In  the  article  leading  this  series,  devoted  to  a  study  of  Michigan's 
waste  land  problem  and  a  project  for  making  the  disused  areas  once  more 
productive,  P.  S.^Lovejoy  of  the  University  of  Michigan  Forestry  faculty, 
stated  that  "a  third  of  Michigan  'virtually  is  bankrupt,"  told  of  the  wealth 
in  forest  products  that  this  area  once  produced,  and  outlined  a  program  of 
restoration.  He  covered  a  vast  geographical  area  and  a  far-reaching  econ- 
omic problem  in  a  condensed  statement.  The  Detroit  News  has  undertaken 
to  explain  the  details  from  sources  of  information  arising  on  the  land 
itself,  and  to  try  to  make  clear  what  is  being  done  to  cope  with  the  prob- 
lem, ivhat  might  be  done,  what  the  benefits  would  be  to  the  whole  State  and 
to  users  of  forest  products — which  is  everybody  everywhere — and  how  the 
individual  citizen  of  Michigan  can  help.  The  following  ten  articles  are  de- 
voted to  that  purpose.) 

By  FRED  E.  JANETTE. 

(of  The  Detroit  News  Staff) 

ARTICLE  I. 

Two  errors  of  judgment,  not  unnatural  to  their  day  and  generation, 
the  same  misjudgment  that  operated  to  produce  bankrupt  lands  in  many 
sections  of  the  country,  worked  in  the  minds  of  Michigan  citizens  in  the 
palmy  days  of  the  lumber  industry.  These  errors  of  judgment  were, 
first,  that  there  was  sp  much  forest  that  the  supply  of  lumber  and  other 
forest  products  was  practically  inexhaustible;  and,  second,  that  farms 
would  follow  and  keep  relative  pace  with  forest  clearing. 

Everybody  now  sees  and  feels  the  effects  of  these  mistakes.  On  the 
one  hand  we  have  a  lumber  shortage  which  means  costs  of  dizzy  height 
—lumber  in  general  has  advanced  97  per  cent  in  price  in  the  last  12 
months — and  on  the  other  hand  we  have,  here  in  Michigan  alone, 
3,000,000  acres' of  one-time  forest  land  in  arrears  for  taxes;  a  record  of 
more  than  2,300,000  acres  in  arrears  for  5  years  running,  reverted  to  the 
state,  literally  bankrupt  and  foreclosed;  with  millions  more  so  unproduc- 
tive that  they  have  to  lean  on  wealthier  sections  of  the  state  for  support 
for  their  roads  and  schools  and  other  public  necessities.  And  there  are 
5,000,000  acres  on  the  tax  rolls  of  an  assessed  valuation  of  $5  an  acre, 
average;  the  taxes  not  collectable  on  vast  stretches  of  them. 

SECOND  OF  ERRORS. 

This  is  the  picture  in  plain  black  and  white,  and  merely  outlined,  of 
a  non-productive  and  sometimes  absolutely  bankrupt  area  three  times  as 
large  as  the  whole  state  of  Connecticut. 

There  are  36,000,000  land  acres  within  Michigan.  In  round  numbers, 
sufficient  for  comparative  purposes,  18,000,000  are  in  farms.  Now  one 
comes  to  consideration  of  the  second  of  the  primal  errors  of  Michigan's 
citizenry  in  the  palmy  days  of  the  lumber  industry — that  "farms  would 
follow  the  lumberman."  They  actually  thought  that  the  denudation  of 
the  land  in  those  days,  with  no  replacement  of  the  forest  wealth,  was  a 
blessing — that  the  forest  was  a  foe  that  had  to  be  conquered  to  give  the 
agriculturist  his  chance.  There  is  a  remnant  of  that  tradition  still  to  be 
found  lurking  in  the  remoter  sections  of  northern  Michigan.  But  it 
has  finally  sifted  down,  in  the  main,  to  the  minds  of  that  species  of  gen- 
try with  which  the  state  is  all  too  familiar — the  sort  engaged  in  selling 
lands  of  starvation  quality  to  ignorant  home  seekers.  The  lumber  in- 
dustry is  pretty  well  gone,  or  going,  in  upper  Michigan,  but  the  "sucker" 
industry  is  still  going,  with  growing  handicaps. 

-It- 


HAS  NOT  KEPT  PACE. 

The  total  farm  area  in  this  state,  exclusive  of  the  fruit  farms,  is 
8,856,000  acres.  That  is  part  of  the  area  which  the  statisticians  allot 
out  of  the  state's  36,000,000  acres  to  the  farmer.  It  is  the  part  which 
the  agriculturist  has  actually  improved.  Then  there  is  an  allotment 
of  6,000,000  more  acres— conceded,  proclaimed  and  properly  advertised 
as  farm  land  of  sufficient  worth  to  pay  a  living-  if  worked.  But  it  has 
not  been  improved.  Without  setting  foot  on  the  millions  of  bankrupt 
acres  with  view  to  tillage,  the  farmer  has  a  field  within  the  confines 
of  this  state  as  big  as  the  State  of  New  Hampshire  in  which  he  has 
not  even  broken  ground. 

This  tells  two  stories  in  one  breath.  It  tells  how  agriculture  has 
NOT  kept  pace  with  land  clearing;  and  it  tells  how  unmitigatedly 
foolish,  when  not  actually  criminal,  is  the  "sucker"  industry  of  selling 
thin  sand  lands  in  remote  Michigan  to  men  who  might  be  working 
on  better  land. 

NOT  ALL  BANKRUPT. 

But  if  we  are  going  to  get  anywhere  that  will  be  a  departure  point 
for  going  forward  we  must  be  fair.  Perhaps  the  passing  use  of  the 
term  North  Michigan  in  the  foregoing  is  not  understood  as  meant. 
The  bankrupt  lands  of  Michigan  are  in  Northern  Michigan.  But  not 
all  North  Michigan  lands  are  bankrupt  lands,  nor  even  starvation 
farming  lands.  Right  here  this  newspaper  takes  pleasure  in  falling 
back  upon  its  own  record  in  this  matter.  Many  columns  have  been 
printed  in  recent  years  to  make  known  the  successful  efforts  of 
agriculturists  on  northern  lands  and  to  hearten  the  state  with  prophecy 
of  wealth  in  foodstuffs  that  bade  fair  to  come  from  them.  Not  a  word 
of  all  this  is  now  recanted.  The  lands  were  there  then,  and  they  are 
there  now — the  most  of  them  awaiting  the  exact  discovery  that  waits 
on  a  land  inventory.  But  if  the  lands  are  there  and  farms  are  there, 
the  farmers  are  not  in  any  such  numbers  as  of  old  The  explanation 
does  not  need  to  be  made  at  length.  It  is  high  wages  in  the  towns 
and,  cities.  Nevertheless,  these  lands  are  agricultural  lands,  and  not 
waste  lands,  vnot  in  the  category  of  the  10,000,000  virtually  bankrupt 
lands.  They  are  oases  in  a  desert. 

Our  business  in  the  former  days  wa&  on  the  oases  Now  we  are 
about  to  explore  and  appraise  the  desert,  leaving  the  farmer  to  raise 
farm  crops  and  see  who  can  raise  a  crop  on  the  desert,  and  what. 
Just  one  thing  is  insisted  on:  while  "one  man  is  trying  to  work  160 
acres  in  the  best  sections  of  the  state,"  which  Dean  Shaw,  of  the 
Michigan  Agricultural  College,  has  told  t'he  writer  is  a  common  fact, 
and  while  there  are  approximately  1,750,000  idle  farm  acres  in  Michigan 
because  there  are  not  farmers  enough,  it  will  continue  to  be  insisted 
and  taken  for  granted  that  attempt  to  divert  farmers  on  to.  lands  that 
haven't  been  able  to  pay  taxes  for  a  period  of  years  is  economic 
criminality  and  ought  to  stop — especially  as  there  is  a  better  way  to 
restore  the  desert  to  production. 

INQUIRE   INTO   OWNERSHIP. 

Dropping  the  term  "desert,"  which  doesn't  sound  nice,  let  the  inquiry 
be  into  the  ownership  and  present  control  as  a  property  of  the  bankrupt 
empire  of  10,000,000  acres.  The  end  in  view  is  an  answer  to  the  ques- 
tion, how  best  to  make  these  unused  acres  productive.  The  land,  its 
amount,  location  and  control  are  the  first  consideration.;  then  the  care 
of  what  of  value  may  now  exist  on  the  land;  lastly,  improvement  by 
cultural  methods. 


The  areas  considered  in  connection  with  this  inquiry  as  to  the  pos- 
sibility of  restoring  the  forests  are  located,  some  areas  small,  some  large 
in  all  the  northern  counties  above  a  line  drawn  from  Saginaw  Bay  to 
Lake  Michigan,  taking  in,  as  the  southern  tier  of  counties  in  the  area 
to  be  examined,  Arenac,  Gladwin,  Clare,  Osceola,  Lake  and  Mason.  This 
means  all  north  Michigan,  including  the  upper  peninsula — 42  counties. 
Just  as  there  are  some  of  the  best  lands  in  the  state  north  of  this  line, 
notably  in  the  Upper  Peninsula,  there  are  bankrupt  lands  below  it.  But 
the  area  defined  is  logically  to  be  called  the  area  wherein  lies  the  bank- 
rupt lands  of  Michigan. 

REVERTING  TO  STATE. 

Corporations  and  individuals  own  by  far  the  largest  number  of  acres, 
and  their  holdings  include  vast  areas  of  non-productive  lands.  These 
are  the  cut-over  timber  lands,  memento  of  the  by-gone  lumber  industry, 
standing  idle,  fire-swept  from  year  to  year,  on  the  books,  of  course,  as 
an  asset — as  a  matter  of  fact  when  the  interests  of  the  whole  state  and 
all  its  people  are  considered,  a  liability.  Among  these  private  holdings 
are  millions  of  acres  verging  from  those  on  the  assessors'  books  at  $5  an 
acre  or  less  to  the  ones  which  the  owners  are  allowing  to  revert  to  the 
state  because  of  non-payment  of  taxes.  What  private  persons  own, 
exactly,  as  to  the  number  of  acres,  is  not  so  important  except  from  this 
last  consideration — as  a  reservoir  from  which  flows  a  continuous  stream 
of  acreage  into  the  state's  ownership.  It  is  with  state  ownership  that 
the  present  problem  has  to  do,  as  of  first  consideration.  It  is  the  land 
to  which  they  themselves  hold  title  that  the  people  of  Michigan  can  re- 
gard as  the  first  element  in  the  problem  of  what  to  do  to  make  the 
idle  acres  again  grow  trees.  What  private  persons  do  or  won't  do  can 
be  forgotten  for  the  time  being.  The  state  has  its  own  land,  idle,  non- 
productive, and  public  attention  can  with  most  profit  be  turned  in 
that  direction. 

The  public  owned  lands  are  of  several  sorts.  State  tax  lands  are 
of  largest  volume.  There  are  University  and  Agricultural  College 
lands,  and  Federal  areas  of  comparatively  small  size.  It  is  the  state 
tax  lands  af  which,  and  to  the  administration  of  which,  the  people  of 
Michigan  must  look  for  practical  experimentation  in  the  labor  of  re- 
storing the  idle  lands  to  profitable  use. 

SOME  IS  RESOLD. 

When  private  owners  have  failed  to  pay  taxes  for  five  years  the 
land  involved  may  by  law  be  deemed  abandoned,  and  it  becomes  state 
property.  .The  Auditor-General  gets  it.  He  has  thus  acquired,  for 
the  people  of  the  state,  2,300,000  acres  since  1893.  The  reversion  of 
this  "five-year"  land  to  the  state  is  continuous,  reversions  occurring 
daily.  The  process  of  bankruptcy  of  these  lands  goes  steadily  on.  The 
rate  of  reversion  is  about  3,000  acres  a  month. 

Some  of  the  land  the  Auditor-General  resells — a  very  small  propor- 
tion; some  he  trades  for  other  lands  of  similar  value  in  order  to  group 
up  the  state's  holdings,  but  the  great  bulk  of  the  increasing  estate  has 
gone  into  and  continues  to  go  into  the  hands  of  the  Public  Domain 
Commission. 

Here  is  where  the  active  work  of  "doing  something"  with  the 
bankrupt  lands  of  Michigan  is  going  on.  What  this  commission  is 
doing,  its  plans  and  accomplishments,  and  the  possibilities  of  accom- 
plishment afford  the  outstanding,  concrete  example  of  what  could  and 
should  be  done  with  the  entire  10.000,000  acres  of  idle  land  within 
the  state.  There,  reclamation  has  begun.  There  it  is  planned  to 
re-establish  the  forests  of  Michigan. 


ARTICLE  It 

By  far  the  largest  owner  of  bankrupt  land  in  Northern  Michigan 
is  the  state. 

The  state,  as  landlord,  at  this  time  has  title  in  a  million  acres,  in 
round  numbers.  The  amount  varies  from  day  to  day,  as  lands  revert 
for  taxes  and  trades  are  made  to  consolidate  the  public  holdings.  The 
greater  part  of  this  state-owned  territory  has  been  organized  into  a 
public  domain.  Lands  in  the  public  domain  are  not  on  sale,  except  to 
round  out  and  perfect  its  geographical  organization.  The  greater  part 
of  Michigan's  landed  estate  is  therefore  out  of  the  market. 

Most  of  the  privately-owned  land  where  bankrupt  or  near  bankrupt 
acreage  prevails  is  on  the  market,  but  not  much  is  being  sold  now, 
except  for  grazing.  Traveling  northward,  making  inquiries  as  to  land 
ownership  as  you  go,  you  will  find  that  the  size  of  individual  and 
corporate  holdings  increase.  In  the  Upper  Peninsula  a  trifle  more  than 
30  concerns  own  6,000,000  acres. 

Lands  in  general  are  being  spoken  of — timber  lands,  potential  farm- 
ing lands,  grazing  lands  and  waste  lands.  There  are  two  or  three 
corporations  on  this  side  of  the  Straits  which  appear  to  have  title  in 
acreages  that  aggregate  as  much  as  some  of  the  large  Upper  Penin- 
sula holdings.  There  are  many  persons  who  would  like  to  know  just 
how  much,  and  also  how  much  of  each  kind  of  land.  There  is  the 
United  States  Government's  Agricultural  Department,  for  instance, 
more  especially  the  Forestry  Bureau.  A  Congressional  resolution, 
originating  with  Senator  Arthur  Capper,  calls  on  the  Forestry  Depart- 
ment to  find  out  how  much  standing  timber  is  left  in  this  country. 
The  department  has  been  trying.  The  result  in  Michigan  has  been 
similar  to  the  result  achieved  by  investigators  from  the  University  of 
Michigan  and  by  The  News  scout,  who  followed  the  trail  up  into  the 
State  Assessors'  office.  All  these  visitors  were  asking  the  same  ques- 
tions. ':v. -'•••''  :  -  •  i-  i  -J 
DEAL  IN  DESCRIPTIONS. 

To  the  questions  about  ownership  and  extent  of  ownership  this  was 
the  answer:  The  field  books  of  the*  assessors  contain  the  information, 
but  it  never  has  been  assembled.  Getting  it  in  form  to  answer  the 
questions  would  mean  the  work  of  several  relatively  expert  persons 
for  several  weeks. 

What  the  assessors  deal  with  is  descriptions,  not  names  of  owners, 
in  their  formulated  records.  While  tax  levies  are  made  on  individuals 
and  corporations  in  their  names,  they  get  a  bill,  not  for  their  whole 
properties  but  for  parts  according  to  descriptions  numbering  hundreds 
for  some  owners.  Segregation  and  assembling  of  these  areas  according 
to  ownership,  with  illuminating  notes  as  to  the  character  of  the  lands — 
timbered,  cut  over,  swamp  or  what  not — would  be  valuable  information 
and  the  assessors  are  quite  willing  to  let  anyone  who  wants  it  come 
and  take  it.  The  men  from  the  United  States  Forestry  Department 
took  a  look,  proclaimed  the  value  of  the  data  in  the  field  books,  said 
they  ought  to  have  the  material  in  assembled  form,  and  that  they 
might  be  back.  That  was  mont'hs  ago  and  they  have  not  returned. 

In  the  assessors'  office  the  opinion  prevails  that  the  information 
would  be  valuable  for  the  state — especially  since  there  seems  to  be  a 
remarkable  new  and  growing  interest  in  Michigan's  one-time  timber 
lands,  now  waste  lands.  Not  only  the  foresters  but  the  soil  men  of 
the  University  and  colleges,  the  development  bureaus  and  persons  of 
forward-looking  tendencies  generally  are  beginning  to  ask  fundamental 
questions  about  those  lands. 

—15— 


\3.  OF  M.  SEEKS  ACTION. 

They  want  to  know  what  denudation  of  North  Michigan  lands  has 
to  do  with  lumber  costs  and  the  shortage  of  houses  in  big  towns  and 
little,  and  they  want  to  know  why  fence  posts  are  costing  so  much  in 
a  "timber  state,"  and  so  on.  But  assembling  these  facts  as  to  ownership 
of  lands  in  detail,  as  to  the  precise  character  rather  than  the  market 
value  only,  of  the  lands  and  their  hereditaments,  is  no  part  of  the  state 
assessors'  business.  They  haven't  any  appropriation  for  such  work. 
They  think  the  matter  might  well  be  attended  to. 

But  one  concrete  suggestion  was  encountered  in  a  rather  lengthy 
inquiry  into  this  matter.  It  appears  that  the  University  of  Michigan 
extension  department,  sensing  the  interest  in  and  importance  of  this 
nation-wide  inquiry  into  forest  products  and  the  forest  industry,  wants 
to  do  something.  If  money  could  be  found  to  finance  the  job,  the 
assessors  at  Lansing  would  be  more  than  willing  to  let  the  skilled 
students  the  University  sends  out  have  the  use  of  the  field  books.  It 
seems  to  be  up  to  the  University  Board  of  Regents. 

Outside  of  areas  which  the  state  acquired  from  Government  land 
grants  in  the  old  days,  and  virtually  all  of  which  went  long  since  in 
sales  to  lumbermen  and  homesteaders,  and  grants  to  educational 
institutions,  the  state's  land  as  we  find  them  today,  the  million  acres 
spoken  of  at  the  beginning  of  this  article,  are  lands  forfeited  to  the 
state  since  1893,  when  the  state  tax  homestead  law  went  into  effect. 

MANY  ACRES  FORFEITED. 

By  operation  of  this  law,  turning  back  to  the  state  land  once  deeded 
to  private  persons  but  on  which  they  failed  to  pay  taxes,  a  total  of 
2,300,000  acres  have  passed  through  the  auditor-general's  hands.  He 
has  resold  to  homesteaders  since  1895  a  total  of  445,798  acres.  So  much 
for  the  first  effort  of  the  colonizer  and  land  developer  to  develop  for 
agriculture  and  allied  industries  the  cut-over  lands  left  by  the  lumber- 
man. How  well  it  succeeded  in  the  palmy  development  days  may  be 
judged  from  the  fact  that  190,598  acres  were  later  forfeited  to  the  state 
again  for  non-payment  of  taxes.  Homesteaders  retain  title  to  this  day 
in  the  remaining  255,200  acres. 

The  reversions  that  are  going  on  now,  adding  to  the  state's  owner- 
ship land  at  the  rate  of  3,000  acres  a  month  come,  some  of  them,  from 
these  retained  homesteads,  but  the  largest  part  now,  as  formerly,  from 
the  old-time  lumber  companies  or  their  successors  who  are  holding 
their  cut-over  lands  hoping — for  what,  who  knows?  Exploitation  for 
agriculture  grows  annually  less  hopeful,  and  yet  prices  for  cut-over 
lands  are  rising.  If  you  ask  why,  the  answer  is  that,  still  hoping  to 
^ell,  the  owner  must  double  his  sale  price  every  10  years  to  catch  up 
with  his  tax  outlay  and  the  compounded  interest  on  his  investment. 

The  state  lands  are  in  the  hands  of  the  auditor  general,  as  "land 
agent."  He  sells  when  he  can,  trades  with  other  Governmental  owners 
when  they  have  land  the  state  wants,  and  turns  the  rest  over  to  the 
Public  Domain  Commission  to  run  as  a  business  undertaking  for  the 
state. 

REPLANTING  IS  TASK. 

He  has  turned  over  the  650,000  acres  spoken  of  above,  and  adds  to 
it  virtually  all  of  the  3,000  acres  that  are  coming  in  every  month.  The 
Public  Domain  Commission,  like  the  auditor-general  with  the  residue 
of  the  state  lands,  carries  on  a  business  of  buy,  sell  and  barter,  to  con- 
solidate its  holdings  and  organize  them  for  business  administration. 
The  real  business  of  the  commission  is  to  conserve  what  resources  are 

—16— 


found  to  have  been  left  by  the  former  owners  and  trying  to  reclaim 
the  land — protecting  what  forest  growth  exists  and  replanting  the 
forests  that  'have  been  devastated. 

Two  things  are  to  be  considered  in  connection  with  this  big-public 
estate  of  650,000  acres.  One  is  that  while  there  is  some  good  land  scat- 
tered on  it,  it  is  the  poorest  land  in  Michigan.  The  other  fact  of  note  is 
that  it  pays  taxes,  every  acre  of  it. 

It  is  the  poorest  land  in  Michigan  as  a  matter  of  course.  It  is  the 
land  made  up  in  largest  part  of  homesteads  and  cut-over  lumber  lands 
which  couldn't  afford  to  pay  taxes  five  years  in  succession  and  was 
allowed  to  revert.  It  is  bankrupt  land  in  t'he  real  meaning  of  the  word. 
That  is  the  broad  fact.  There  are  comparatively  large  areas  of  good 
land  in  the  public  domain,  some  of  it,  as  will  later  be  shown,  capable 
of  yielding  today  thousands  of  dollars  to  the.  state  treasury  from  sale 
of  standing  timber. 

OPPOSITION  AT  FIRST. 

Good  or  bad,  as  stated,  all  pay  taxes.  The  reason  for  this  throws 
a  vivid  light  on  conditions  under  which  the  would-be  regenerators 
of  the  bankrupt  lands  would  have  to  work.  Up  to  1917  there  was 
opposition  all  through  the  north  country  to  the  policy  of  turning  these 
bankrupt  acres  over  to  the  Public  Domain  Commission  for  withdrawal 
from  the  market.  At  first  it  was  the  local  patriots  and  the  exploiters, 
joining  chorus  in  the  chant  that  the  lands  ought  to  be  sold^  by  the 
auditor-general  and  "the  farmers  given  a  chance  to  develop"  them. 
Latterly  the  chances  of  getting  farmers  on  to  such  land  becoming 
more  and  more  remote,  the  opposition  centered  on  the  true-enough 
claim  that  withdrawal  of  these  lands  would  mean  that  the  counties  in 
which  they  were  located  never  would  derive  any  tax  money  from 
them — a  genuine  hardship  in  the  poorer  counties  and  a  valid-enough 
argument,  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  the  lands  in  question  had  reverted 
because  they  did  not  pay  taxes.  They  might,  some  time. 

The  argument  was  wiped  out  at  the  legislative  session  of  1917  by 
enactment  of  a  law  which  requires  the  Public  Domain  Commission  to 
pay  a  tax  of  5  cents  an  acre  on  all  its  holdings,  and  of  this  amount 
the  counties  having  public  domain  lands  get  their  share.  What  helped 
to  enact  this  law  was  a  provision  in  it  that  the  money  so  derived  must 
be  used  for  the  construction  of  highways.  If  there  is  anything  these 
interior  northern  counties  dote  on  it  rs  highways.  They  need  them. 

PUBLIC  PAYS  TAXES. 

So  the  public  pays  taxes  on  its  North  Michigan  domain,  whether 
some  of  the  other  fellows  do  or  not.  Next,  naturally,  we  want  to 
know  about  income — and  here  we  are,  again,  back  on  the  main  track. 
We  will  hardly  need  to  be  told  that  the  public  domain  is  not  earning 
its  taxes,  much  less  earning  anything  for  the  public — not  at  this  time. 
What  we  want  to  know  is,  what  are  our  representatives  on  the  job 
doing  to  make  the  proposition  pay  out — taxes  anyhow,  with  a  view 
to  net  income  sometime?  That  is  the  main  track  spoken  of. 

Answering  that  question,  one  must  of  necessity  at  the  same  time 
furnish  facts  that  will  answer  the  larger  questions  about  the 'conditions 
and  prospects  of  the  whole  10,000,000  acres  of  bankrupt  lands,  among 
which  lie  the  acres  of  the  state  domain.  Remember  that  the  public 
domain  is  a  sample  of  the  whole — worse  land,  but  better  administered, 
as  probably  will  be  agreed  when  the  facts  are  set  forth.  The  conditions 
of  the  country  and' the  problems  of  the  people  on  the  land,  as  also  the 
problems  of  the  people  on  the  undeveloped  lands  and  in  the  towns  and 

—17— 


cities,  of  all  Michigan,  in  support  of  whatever  remedial  measures  may 
be  adopted,  are  practically  the  same  whether  the  lands  be  public  or 
private. 

The  forces  that  operated  to  make  bankrupt  the  lands  the  state  owns 
are  still  operating.  They  are  forcing  into  bankruptcy  millions  more 
of  acres  which  the  state,  if  it  doesn't  look  out,  may  become  the  owner 
of,  as  Sinbad  "owned"  the  Old  Man  of  the  $ea. 

PROBLEMS  ARE  GIGANTIC. 

The  job  of  putting  a  stop  to  or  at  least  mitigating  the  force  of 
operation  of  these  bankrupting  causes  is  the  same  on  the  private  lands 
as  the  public  lands;  as  also  the  problem  of  restoring  the  lands  to  use 
and  profit  once  correction  is  affected. 

These  problems  are  concrete.  They  are  reality  itself,  and  they  are 
gigantic,  some  of  them.  There  is  one,  among  the  most  important,  that 
might  not  occur  to  any  one  considering  the  reclamation  of  disused 
lands  as  a  land  and  crop  problem,  merely.  Off  hand,  it  might  be  said: 
well,  there  is  the  land,  poor  quality,  of  course,  nothing  on  it  much  that 
is  marketable — the  problem  is  to  make  things  grow  on  it  that  will  pay. 
But  that  is  not  where  the  problem  begins  for  the  forward-looking 
men  who  have  the  reclamation  of  the  bankrupt  acres  of  Northern 
Michigan  at  heart. 

The  simile  of  a  location  for  the  re-establishment  of  a  business 
would  line  up  closer  to  fact  if  not  vacant  land,  but  a  factory  building 
were  conceived.  If  it  were  a  factory  building  to  be  re-equipped  and 
set  going,  but  which  stood  disused,  vacant  and  but  little  watched,  this 
one  necessity  would  instantly  occur  to  mind:  what  we  have,  the  vacant 
building,  must  first  be  protected. 

That  is  the  case  with  the  northern  lands.  About  a  third  of  our 
potential  "forest  factory"  is  fire-swept  every  five  to  six  years.  When 
he  gets  all  the  facts  an  average  person  would  inquire  with  some  impa- 
tience, what's  the  use  of  talking  about  beginning  to  re-establish  the 
forest  industry  on  the  old-time  forest  lands  when  what  is  left  is  liable 
to  be  burned?  The  answer  would  have  to  be:  very  little  use,  indeed. 

DESTROYS   LAND'S   VIRILITY. 

And  the  man  having  knowledge  of  what  a  real  forest  fire  really  does 
would  wonder  what  the  impatient  one  would  say  if  he  knew,  as  Mr. 
Lovejoy  in  preceding  articles  has  stated,  that  the  fires  not  only  burn 
the  growth  on  the  lands,  but  burn  up  the  land  itself,  its  virility,  making 
it  little  by  little,  a  desert  more  and  more  incapable  of  reclamation. 

The  forest  fire  menace  is  the  hurdle  on  the  threshold  of  the  waste 
land  problem.  This  can  be  proved  by  telling  what  the  fires  have  done 
to  make  so  much  of  north  Michigan  bankrupt,  what  they  are  still 
doing,  and  what,  possibly,  can  be  done  about  it. 


ARTICLE  III. 

There  are  men  now  living,  men  who  don't  admit  that  they  are  ^ld, 
who  still  have  in  their  ears  the  screech  of  the  circular  saw  that  ripped 
through  obese  pine  logs  and  yowled  through  dense  forests  that  cov- 
ered the  lands  which  today  appear  in  these  chronicles  as  the  "bank- 
rupt lands  of  noftnerti  Mie'hlgiin."  For  more  than  20  years,  that  .is, 
from  1870  to  beyoild  18%.. Michigan  led  the  world  in  lumber  produc- 
tion, dropped  seeefid  td  Wiscb'hsin  in  the  hefct  ileeil'H  *nd  by  the  end 


of  the  following  10  years  had  dropped  suddenly  out  of  the  list  of  eight 
important  lumber  producing  states  of  the  union.  The  Southern  pine 
industry  had  developed,  and  the  Northwest  coast  industry  was  get- 
ting on  its  feet  in  those  later  years. 

12  MILLION  ACRES. 

In  Michigan,_  in  the  palmy  days  of  lumbering  and  denudation  of 
land,  there  were  lumbered  off  or  burned  12  million  acres  of  pinery. 
The  figure  is  given  by  Filibert  Roth,  head  of  the  University  of  Michigan 
Forestry  faculty.  And  at  15,000  feet  of  lumber  to  the  acre  this  meant 
180  billion  feet — all  pine;  while  8  million  acres  of  hardwood  at  10  thou- 
sand board  feet  to  the  acre  yielded  80  billion  more.  The  total  lumber 
logged  OR  BURNED  in  North  Michigan  the  professor  estimates  at  260 
billion  feet,  and  as  an  estimator  in  this  field  of  inquiry  Prof.  Roth,  one 
quickly  learns,  has  the  reputation  of  being  pre-eminent. 

Loss  by  fire  interests  us  just  now.  Fire  has  run  neck  and  neck  with 
the  lumber  operators  in  the  wholesale  job  of'  devastating  acres  by  the 
millions.  Now  the  yowl  of  the  circular  saw  is  hushed  in  these  lands, 
down  to  -the  merest  murmur,  the  camps  are  "folded  and  gone,"  but  the 
fires  are  not  gone.  .They  continue  in  the  business  of  denudation  and 
desert  production. 

ONE-THIRD   BURNED. 

While  lumbering  was  active,  and  lumber  towns  flourishing,  and  rail- 
roads reaching  tentacles  farther  and  farther  into  the  land  to  take  in 
supplies  and  bring  in  the  products  of  the  camps  and  mills,  fire  was 
eating  up,  according  to  Prof.  Roth's  estimate,  something  less  than  23 
per  cent  of  the  timber  which  nature  had  set  on  the  land.  The  lumber- 
men themselves  commonly  estimate  the  fire  loss  of  those  days  to  have 
been  fully  one-third. 

The  Michigan  lumber  cut  today  is  not  to  be  sniffed  at,  considering 
demands  and  prices — it  is  now  about  a  billion  feet  a  year,  over 
$75,000,000  worth,  taking  the  forest  growth  off  100,000  acres  every 
twelve  month,  adding  that  much  area  every  year  to  the  millions  of  acres 
of  stump  lands  now  existing.  These  are  Prof.  Roth's  figures  again. 
What  is  left  is  very  valuable  indeed,  and  what  could  be  put  back 
would  be  much  more  valuable,  both  of  which  facts  need  to  be  borne 
in  mind  as  bearing  on  the  fire  question.  But  what  the  fires  did  besides 
burning  up  about  $1,200,000,000  worth  of  trees,  reckoned  on  values  of 
the  time  of  the  old  days  of  lumbering,  is  really  most  important  of  all, 
and  for  this  reason:  What  the  fires  did  then  in  addition  to  burning 
timber  they  are  doing  to  this  day. 

What  they  did,  and  continue  to  do,  is  to  make  absolute,  complete 
and  all  but  irretrievable  the  havoc  wrought  by  the  timber  cutters. 
First  take  the  superficial  aspects  of  this  moving  picture  of  advancing 
desolation. 

Towns  dwindled  when  the  timber  stands  receded  before  the  saw 
and  ax,  and  nothing  industrial  of  equal  consequence  came  in  to  take 
the  place  of  lumbering.  All  native  Michiganders,  even  in  the  largest 
cities,  where  live  people  who  never  saw  a  pine  tree,  know  about  that, 
realizing  well  the  general  effect.  What  is  not  so  well  realized  is  how 
completely  the  fires  that  crept  over  the  devastated  lands,  through  the 
"slashings"  and  through  what  timber  tracts  the  first  operations  had 
left,  completed  the  devastation  begun  by  the  lumbermen.  Much  less 
is  it  realized  that  besides  burning  the  forest  growth,  virgin  and  second 
growth,  the  fires  burned  the  soil  itself. 

—19— 


Even  a  forest  fire  rias  something  good  about  it.  The  greatest 
enemy  of  the  bankrupt  land  area,  second  or  even  equal  to  the  hurry-up 
lumber  operator,  has  been  fire;  but  fire  also  has  been  the  servant 
of  the  farmer  in  clearing,  and  it  has  been  the  agency  of  nature  in 
helping  restock  denuded  lands.  Fire  that  may  destroy  the  seed  of  the 
remnant,  solitary  white  pine,  cooks  the  hard  cone  of  the  jack  pine, 
pops  out  the  seed  and  aids  that  species,  for  one,  to  propagate. 

THE  JACK  PINE'S  DAY. 

This  fire  susceptibility  of  the  white  pine  and  fire  resistance  of  the 
jack  pine  helps  to  account  for  the  spread  of  the  latter  humbler  and 
less  valuable  species  on  areas  where  once  the  majestic  White  pine 
flourished.  But  the  once  despised  jack  pine  is  not  so  despicable  nowa- 
days. Timber  shortage  and  famine  prices  have  brought  him  well  for- 
ward in  the  esteem  of  men  who  once  anathematized  him. 

Jack  Pine  on  white  pine  land  is  a  symptom  of  what  the  fires  do  to 
the  soil.  They  do  more  than  that.  Just  what,  let  Prof.  Roth  tell: 

"Fires  destroy  the  mulch  of  leaves,  twigs  and  rotting  limbs.  The 
mulch  varies  from  500  pounds  an  acre  in  good  jack  pine  to  2,000 
pounds  of  leaves  alone  in  a  forest  of  beech  and  maple.  The  leaf  fall 
of  1919  is,  say,  a  ton  per  acre  in  a  good  stand.  This  is  rotted  and 
turned  to  leaf  mold  by  1923;  the  leaf  mold  of  1920,  '21  and  '22  mean- 
time covering  the  ground  as  a  layer  of  dead  leaves,  the  more  recent 
firm  and  dry  on  top.  Insects,  fungi,  bacteria  and  worms  are  all  at 
work  and  are  necessary  to  good  fertile  soil.  A  heavy  fire  burns  all 
this,  -often  two  to  four  inches  down. 

WOULD  COST  $10  AN  ACRE. 

"If  this  land  were  farmed  at  once  the  ashes  would  be  too  deep  on 
much  land,  but  on  the  whole  would  be  of  some  help;  but  the  mulch, 
the  mold  and  the  living  things  necessary  to  make  this  leaf  mold  are 
all  gone.  It  would  cost  not  less  than  $10  an  acre  to  get  this  land  back 
where  it  was,  only  as  a  good  beginning;  and  it  would  take  a  number 
of  years.  The  poorer  the  land  the  harder,  the  slower  the  recovery." 

Here  the  professor,  without  having  it  exactly  in  mind,  is  talking 
about  that  million-acre  estate  of  We,  Us  &  Co.  Ours  is  the  poor  land — 
poorest  of  all,  the  land  "slowest  to  recover"  from  fire  damage.  We 
must  remember  this  when  we  come  to  take  account  of  what  the 
administrators  of  our  property  are  doing  to  protect  us  from  fire  and 
to  restock  our  land. 

When  removal  of  the  forest  and  the  sawmills  gave  the  average 
lumber  town  of  North  Michigan  a  jolt  backwards,  beginning  along 
in  the  early  '90s  and  continuing  down  to  today;  when  fires  came  up 
through  the  slashings  and  the  wasted  lands  that  had  grown  up  to 
scrub  oak  and  poplar;  and  when  they  burned  up  many  towns  and 
drove  their  populations  into  the  lakes  or  sent  them  flying,  scorched 
and  half  naked,  over  the  warped  rails  of  the  railroads,  seeking  for  the 
safety  they  didn't  always  find,  the  fires  had  not  done  all  their  damage. 
Oscoda,  in  1911,  and  Metz,  five  years  before  that,  were  tragedies  so 
great  that  nobody  can  forget.  A  fugitive  flat-car  load  of  people, 
mostly  women  and  children,  burned  to  death  near  Metz.  A  steamer 
happening  along  just  save.d  Oscoda's  people,  crowded  on  a  wharf,  while 
the  town  burned  up.  These  are  only  episodes  in  a  long  tale  of  terror. 

FERTILITY  BURNED  OUT. 

But,  more  than  this,  these  fires  burned  out  the  fertility  of  the  land. 
Towns  have  dwindled,  railroad  spurs  been  taken  up,  homesteads 

—20— 


abandoned,  much  else  of  decay  and  desolation  wrought,  not  only 
because  the  lumber  industry  has  gone,  but  because  soil  fertility,  if  not 
quite  gone,  is  so  badly  impaired  that  it  starves  out  the  farmer.  And 
when  you  starve  out  the  farmer  in  a  pioneer  country  you  starve  out 
the  town  and  the  railroad.  You  remember  about  the  homesteaders  on 
those  190,598  acres  within  what  is  now  "our"  landed  estate— starved 
out  and  their  farms  become  the  property  of  the  state?  If  that  much 
territory  drifted  into  starvation,  you  may  well  ask  how  much  more 
towns  and  villages  along  with  the  farms  have  suffered  from  famine. 
If  you  asked,  nobody  would  answer.  Nobody  could. 

In  the  face  of  this  lugubrious  record,  along  comes,  now,  a 
proposition  to  restock  with  forest  growth  such  of  these  devastated 
lands  as  are  obviously  and  concededly  not  fit  for  agriculture.  It  must 
be  evident  to  all  readers  that  there  are  available  for  agriculture 
millions  of  acres  more  than  are  included  in  the  public  domain.  That 
is,  indeed,  the  proposition — to  restock  with  forest  growth  much  of 
this  wasted  acreage.  It  is  necessary  to  come  quickly  to  an  under- 
standing of  what  is  meant  by  "restocking." 
WHAT  IS  MEANT. 

In  the  large,  it  means  a  proposal  to  begin  to  put  back  on  the 
bankrupt  and  near-bankrupt  acres  the  forest  industry  that  once  made 
it  enormously  wealth  producing.  And  to  put  it  back  in  a  way  not  to 
furnish  another  single  harvest  as  of  yore,  but  as  a  permanent,  estab- 
lished, self-perpetuating  industry.  "Putting  it  back"  is  another  term 
that  must  be  explained. 

Restoring,  replacing  for  perpetuity,  in  small  or  large  degree,  the 
forest  industry  of  Michigan,  restocking  the  idle  lands  with  forest 
growth, -means  replanting  as  a  part  of  the  plan.  Even  more  than  that 
it  means  assisting  nature  to  do  the  work  herself.  Forests  may  fall 
before  the  woodsman  or  go  up  in  smoke,  but  the  beneficent  restorative 
offices  of  Mother  Nature  go  on  forever,  if  not  wilfully  allowed  to  be 
impeded. 

Nature  is  doing  her  best  to  bring  back  to"  production  vast  areas  of 
non-productive  land  in  the  region  under  consideration.  As  has  been 
hinted  in  the  passing  remarks  about  the  jack  pine  taking  the  white 
pine's  place,  she  does  not  do  her  best  work,  doesn't  replace  No.  1 
growth  with  No.  1,  but  with  a  poorer  stock,  unless  she  is  assisted. 
The  first  help,  and  perhaps  the  greatest  help,  she  gets  in  the  North 
country  is  from  the  fire  fighters — and  their  help  isn't  anything  that 
it  ought  to  be. 

Consideration  of  the  fire  element  in  the  general  problem  will  not 
be  complete  without  examining  into  the  fire-fighting  needs  and  per- 
formances on  the  10,000,000  acres  of  idle  lands. 


ARTICLE  IV. 

Owners  of  the  Michigan  public  domain,  the  citizens  of  Michigan, 
well  may  ask  what  is  being  done  to  control  the  fires  which  are  burr 
ing  the  remnants  of  the  state's  forest  wealth  and  gradually  reducing  to 
infertile  mineral  nakedness  the  soil  on  which  the  forests  grew.     They 
may  well  ask  the  question  in  its  relation  to  the  state's  own  domain  o 
upwards  to  a  million  acres,  and  they  can  as  legitimately  ask  it  as  per- 
taining to  the  other  domain  of  more  than  9,000,000  acres  belonging  to 
private  persons. 

For  the  land  and  forest  question  means  food  and   housing  for  all 
along  with  multitudinous  other  things,  such  as  ties  for  railroads,  now 

—21— 


lamentably  deficient,  constituting  one  of  the  big  railway  reconstruction 
problems;  such  as  shoes,  the  leather  of  which  must  have  its  tanbark; 
such  as  newspapers,  for  they  must  have  their^pulpwfJod,  growing  on 
the  stump — it  is  there  that  began  the  printed  page  which  conveys  to 
you  at  this  moment  the  fundamental  facts  having  to  do  with  the  fire 
menace  on  forest  lands. 

FIRE  IS  PERIL. 

Something  of  the  real  importance  of  the  forest  industry  which  for- 
ward-looking men  are  trying  to  save_and  replenish,  it  is  hoped,  is  be- 
ginning to  dawn  on  the  minds  of  persons  who  are  too  busy  with  imme- 
diate affairs  to  go  back,  and  back,  and  back  to  the  sources  of  things. 

Control  of  fire  in  the  woods  and  in  the  slashings,  which  are  the 
stump  lands  strewn  with  the  tops  and  branches  of  trees  left  by  the 
lumbermen,  would  mean  not  only  valuable  property  saved  but  prop- 
erty created.  Just  merely  mitigating  the  fire  evil  would  do  much. 
What  it  would  mean  to  many  important  industries  and  sources  of  the 
supply  in  the  daily  life  of  the  citizen  will  be  more  fully  indicated  later, 
but  take  one  qf  them  which,  naturally,  the  investigator  into  these 
things  especially  well  remembers.  Take  pulpwood  and  the  paper 
supply. 

"If  you  will  keep  the  fires  out  of  the  Michigan  north  woods  for  10 
years,"  Prof.  Roth  remarked  during  a  conversation,  "there  will  be 
5,000,000  cords  of  wood  pulp  in  those  woods  not  existing  today,  and 
5,000,000  cords  of  wood  pulp  is  equal  to  the  entire  amount  of  wood 
pulp  used  in  the  United  States  in  one  year." 

USES  FOR  PULP. 

And  newspaper  use  is  not  the  only  use  for  wood  pulp.  Pulp  goes 
into  paper  mache,  strawboard,  wrapping  paper,  bo.ok  paper  and  many 
other  things.  Mr.  Roth,  by  his  fire  prevention  program,  would,  in 
a  sense,  supply  all  these  industries  from  the  depleted  Michigan  forest 
lands  alone. 

On  a  large  part  of  15,000,000  acres  of  cut-over  land  lying  idle  in 
this  state,  he  pointed  out,  there  is  more  or  less  of  a  second  growth, 
self-sown  or  self-sprouted,  which  will  keep  growing  provided  the  fires 
do  not  destroy  it.  He  includes  5,000,000  acres  more  than  we  have 
been  dealing  with;  for  there  are  cut-over  lands  in  Michigan  not  rightly 
to  be  included  in  the  10,000,000  acres  of  bankrupt  or  near-bankrupt 
lands.  If  only  10,000,000  acres  were  to  be  converted  into  a  real  forest, 
however — that  is,  by  planting  where  planting  is  needed,  filling  in  the 
gaps  left  by  voluntary  seeding — these  10,000,000  acres  would  produce 
yearly  the  5,000,000  cords  of  wood  pulp  needed,  Mr.  Roth  added. 
Evidently  he  would  include  some  hardwood  lands  of  the  Upper 
Peninsula,  where  there  is  much  of  his  15,000,000  acres  of  cut-overs. 
Much  of  this  better  cut-over  land  about  the  state  is  first-class  grazing 
ground.  At  that,  it  will  be  learned  that  dealing  with  OUR  lands,  the 
public  domain,  approximating  results  could  be  accomplished. 

SPARK  CREATES  HAVOC. 

The  statistician's  figures  are  interpreted  as  being  somewhat  larger 
than  realizable  in  practice.  Absolute  control  of  forest  fires — "keeping 
them  out" — is  not  expected  by  foresters  or  anybody  else.  Nowhere 
in  the  world  where  forests  grow,  probably,  is  that  possible.  Relative 
control  is  possible,  and  is  accomplished  in  places,  such  as  parts  of 
the  United  States  Government  forest  reserves  and  the  municipal  and 
state-owned  forests  in  European  countries.  Fires  in  the  woods  and 

__22— 


on  the  sand  plains  of  Upper  Michigan  there  will  always  be,  probably. 
A  locomotive  spark  or  a  cigaret  stub  has  been  known  to  burn  over 
an  area  equivalent  to  a  county.  Fires  will  start.  Stopping  them 
before  they  get  far  is  what  fire  "control"  in  North  Michigan  means. 

J.  Girvin  Peters,  chief  of  the  United  States  Forestry  Department 
which  co-operates  with  the  Michigan  and  23  other  state  governments 
in  fighting  forest  fires,  estimated  in  1912  that  an  average  of  10,000,000 
acres  are  burned  over  annually  in  the  United  States,  with  a  money 
loss  of  about  $20,000,000.  A  sizable  bonfire. 

STATE'S  FIRE  LOSS. 

Michigan's  loss  by  forest  fires  for  a  period  of  10  years  ending  in 
1911,  is  declared  in  a  circular  of  the  Forest  Fire  Protective  department 
of  the  Michigan  Hardwood  Manufacturers'  Association,  to  have  been 
$20,000,000.  Of  the  annual  loss,  then,  for  a  10-year  period,  Michigan's 
loss  was  one-tenth  of  the  total  for  the  country — all  out  of  proportion 
when  one  remembers  that  in  these  latter  years  Michigan's  timber 
wealth  per  acre  does  not  approach  that  of  western  states  which  come 
in  the  reckoning. 

And  note  that  these  losses  are  of  timber  values  only.  Loss  by  soil 
depreciation  and  because  of  the  starving  out  of  the  farmers  and  town 
dwellers  dependent  on  forest  or  agricultural  harvest  is  given  no  place 
in  the  totals.  Nor  even  is  the  damage  to  young  stands  of  timber  and 
growth  well  begun  but  too  young  to  be  called  timber,  reckoned  in. 
The  figures  are  for  losses  in  timber  merchantable  as  such  at  the  time 
of  estimate. 

Setting  aside  statements  of  values,  of  dizzying  heights,  take  areas. 
An  average  of  half  a  million  acres  is  burned  over  in  Michigan  every 
year.  The  two  active  fire  seasons  are  spring  and  autumn,  spring  the 
worst,  though  this  is  not  understood  generally.  The  reasons  will 
appear  when  the  details  of  forest  fire  fighting  are  given.  One  of  J. 
Girvin  Fetters'  men,  who  was  here  during  the  bad  fire  season  of  1919, 
reported  back  to  his  chief  that  "at  least  a  half  a  million  acres  have 
burned  over  in  Michigan  to  date,"  and  the  date  was  in  midsummer, 
with  the  fall  fires  to  come. 

ESTIMATE  BURNT  AREA. 

x  Half  a  million  "acres  for  every  year  may  be  argued  against  as  too 
large  an  estimate,  but  considering  that  there  have  been  many  "bad" 
years  equal  to  or  worse  than  1919,  that  there  has  been  in  time  past 
more  to  burn  and  less  protection  even  than  now,  and  that  the  effort  to 
minimize  the  facts  of  destruction  has  been  stronger  in  the  past  than  it 
is  now,  the  belief  is  that  an  estimate  of  500,000  acres  of  fire  in  this 
state  for  every  year  is  not  too  large.  That  is  the  area  of  an  average 
Lower  Peninsula  county,  burned  over  yearly.  The  fires  have  burned 
every  year  for  the  last  half  century.  Of  course  many  of  the  same 
acres  burn  over,  again  and  again.  It  is,  in  fact,  repeated  fires  on  the 
same  land  that  work  the  real  havoc. 

You  will  want  to  be  told  at  once,  if  you  do  not  know,  what  is  being 
done  about  it.  The  forest  fire  fighting  organization,  its  operation,  the 
cost,  the  results  accomplished  and  what  might  reasonably  be  expected 
to  be  accomplished — these  subjects  are  of  first  importance  in  consid- 
ering what  should  be  done  to  make  Michigan's  bankrupt  aeres,  state 
and  private  owned,  remunerative. 


TWO  FOREST  FIRES   EACH   YEAR. 

The  state  maintains  two  forest  fire  departments,  both  under  the 
control  of  the  Public  Domain  Commission.  There  is  one  for  a  part  of 
the  state's  own  domain,  another  for  North  Michigan  outside  of  that 
area. 

About  half  of  the  state's  domain  has  been  set  aside  as  forest  land 
reservations,  called  in  the  vernacular  of  officialdom  "state  forests," 
though  large  parts  of  them  are  as  bald  as  an  Arctic  waste.  There  are 
about  325,000  acres  in  the  Forest  Reserve  system,  and  156,258  acres 
in  the  eight  forests  that  have  been  "opened,"  to  date.  The  opening 
plan  now  contemplates  two  new  forests  every  year;  so  that,  while  the 
plan  has  not  been  fully  carried  out,  the  number  of  state  forests  and 
the  number  of  acres  in  each  of  the  opened  forests  is  continually  in- 
creasing. "Opening"  a  state  forest  consists  of  marking  its  boundaries, 
putting  up  a  house  and  a  barn,  also  a  watchtower  or  two,  stringing 
telephone  lines,  and  beginning  construction  of  fire  lines  and  setting  out 
trees. 

FORESTER  IS  WARDEN. 

Over  the  state  forest  the  state  forester  is  fire  warden,  and  on  h.is 
domain  the  other  state  organization  has  nothing  to  do.  The  other 
organization  contends  with  forest  fires  over  the  rest  of  Northern 
Michigan.  This  is  one  of  the  departments  of  a  department  subordinate 
to  the  Public  Domain  Commission,  the  State  Game,  Fish  and  Forest 
Fire  Department. 

Forest  fire  fighting  in  both  departments  goes  along  with  something 
else,  in  the  case  of  the  state  forest  part  of  the  public  domain  it  goes 
with  propagation  of  forests,  and  in  the  case  of  the  millions  of  acres 
outside  the  state  forests,  both  public  and  private  lands,  it  goes  with 
propagation  of  fish  and  game  and  enforcement  of  the  game  laws. 
Secretary  George  L.  Lusk  of  the  Public  Domain  Commission  is  the 
fire  chief,  leader  of  both  fire  wardens. 

The  state  maintains  a  fire  department  to  fight  fires  on  private 
lands  for  the  same  reason  that  fire  departments  are  maintained  in 
cities,  because  property  protection  is  a  public  function  and  duty.  The 
beneficiaries  are  taxed,  of  course.  There  are  two  private  fire  fighting 
organizations  among  timber  owners,  but  both  moribund. 

Fire  fighting  on  that  part  of  the  public  domain  included  in  the 
forest  reserves  is  a  very  different  business  from  fighting  fires  over  the 
millions  of  acres  outside — the  problem  on  the  state's  own  land  which 
has  been  organized  for  use  can  be  and  is  dealt  with  differently  than 
that  on  widespread  land,  more  than  nine-tenths  of  which  is  privately 
owned.  It  appears  to  be  a  more  difficult  problem.  At  all  events, 
State  Forester  Marcus  Schaaf  appears  to  have  better  control  of  the 
situation  than  the  state  fire  warden  and  his  men. 

COUNTIES  ARE  GROUPED. 

These  latter  have  the  job  set  for  them  of  protecting  not  only  most 
of  the  10,000,000  acres  of  bankrupt  and  near-bankrupt  lands  but  mil- 
lions of  acres  of  contiguous  lands  which,  some  of  them,  are  of  very 
great  value  because  of  standing  timber  on  them.  Indeed,  there  is  yet 
a  substantial  notion  prevalent  among  these  fire  fighters  that  protection 
of  standing  timber  is  their  main  job,  if  not  their  only  job.  You  can 
hardly  expect  the  average  deputy  fire  warden  or  his  helpers  to  admit 
the  high  cost  of  destruction  of  soil  by  fire  until  the  fact  has  been  called 
to  his  attention  forcibly. 


For  fighting  fires  in  the  vast  territory  outside  the  state  forests,  the 
36  counties  in  the  forest  fire  area  have  been  grouped  by  Fire  Warden 
John  Baird  into  10  divisions,  each  a  fire  district  in  charge  of  a  deputy 
fire  warden,  who  lives  somewhere  in  his  district.  Assisting  the  10 
deputy  fire  wardens  are  39  special  men,  apportioned  among  the  dis- 
tricts, and  one  inspector  of  railroad  rights  of  way  for  t'he  whole  terri- 
tory. These  men  serve  all  the  year  round.  To  these  50  men  add,  for 
the  fire  season,  42  game  and  "fish  wardens  on  the' regular  payroll  who 
are  instructed  to  give  especial  attention  to  forest  fire  fighting  in  the 
season.  All  are  under  direct  command  of  the  State  Fish,  Game  and 
Forest  Fire  Commissioner. 
COST  OF  FIRE  FORCE. 

This  completes  the  standing  fire  fighting  force  to  contend  with  fires 
raging  sporadically  over  an  area  four  times  the  size  of  Massachusetts, 
and  burning  on  the  average  every  year  an  area  equal  to  a  common 
sized  county.  Burning  in  spite  of  the  fire  fighters  and  the  fire  fight- 
ing. When  fires  rage  large  or  become  epidemic,  casuals  are  called 
out  for  the  emergency,  and  the  state  and  townships  jointly  foot  the 
bill. 

This  leads  to  a  consideration  of  the  finances  of  fire  fighting  and 
begins  to  let  the  light  in  on  the  question,  what  might,  as  a  matter  of 
plain  business,  be  spent  on  this  work. 

ARTICLE  V. 

The  plain  evidence  of  the  records  is  that  Michigan's  forest  fire- 
fighting  business  has  suffered  because  of  its  partnership  with  the  state's 
game  department.  It  has  been  subordinated.  That  is  the  fact  obvious 
to  a  person  looking  at  the  whole  situation  with  an  eye  keen  for  prop- 
erty values. 

Without  minimizing  the  worth  of  fish  and  game  propagation,  it  will 
be  found,  when  the  balance  is  struck,  that  the  sportsman's  interests  are 
accounted  a  very  large  figure  in  the  total. 

By  comparison  forest  fire  protection  in  North  Michigan  shows  up 
scantily  beside  game  protection. 

ONLY  50  FIREMEN. 

The  state  provides  the  State  Fire  Warden,  who  is  also  Fish 
anil  Game  Warden,  with  50  men  as  a  standing  fire  protection  force. 
And  the  area  which  these  50  men  must  "protect"  is  that  from  the  north 
line  of  the  counties  of  Arenac-to-Mason  up  to  the  straits,  across  the 
straits  and  westward  through  the  Upper  Peninsula  to  the  Wisconsin 
border.  You  could  set  New  Hampshire,  Vermont,  Massachusetts  and 
Connecticut  down  on  top  of  that  territory  and  not  much  of  them  would 
get  wet. 

In  the  fire  season  42  fish  and  game  wardens  turn  in  to  help  the  fire- 
men, but  they  have  their  fish  and  game  laws  to  enforce  meantime. 

This  is  the  skeleton  organization,  filled  in  when  crises  arise  by  im- 
pressment of  help  from  the  towns  and  farms.  It  should  bemadded  that 
there  are — or  were  last  season — eight  horsemen  of  the  State  Con- 
stabulary operating  from  one  point  over  one  of  the  worst  areas;  out 
of  Pellston  and  through  the  northwest  counties  of  the  Lower  Penin- 
sula, acting  as  rangers  to  enforce  the  fire  laws*,  educate  the  public  and 
give  warning  of  incipient  fires.  Every  township  supervisor  is  also,  by 
effect  of  the  forest  fire  protection  law  of  1903,  a  fire  warden.  They 
are  seen  at  their  height  of  action,  as  a  rule,  when  it  comes  to  drum- 
ming up  volunteers  for  emergency  fire  fighting. 

— 25—  t.iiu_  ^ 


MICHIGAN'S  FIRE  IDEA. 

It  is  plain  at  once  that  Michigan's  forest  fire  fighting  idea  seems 
to  be,  basically,  to  have  a  small  force  of  men  widely  dispersed  over 
a  vast  area,  to  raise  the  cry  of  "fire!"  when  the  fire  gets  going  and 
rally  the  bucket  brigade.  The  bucket  brigade  is  no  slouch,  either. 
For  a  mob  organization  it  has  done  enormous  work.  The  forestry 
statisticians  have  taken  pencil  and  paper  and  figured  it  all  out,  on  the 
basis  of  days'  work  at  the  going  rate  'per  day,  multiplied  into  the 
reported  and  estimated  numbers  of  up-state  natives  who  have  labored 
in  heat  and  smoke  to  save  themselves  and  their  neighbors. 

"In  1918  and  1919  they  did  free  work  they  would  not  have  done 
for  $8,000,000  in  pay,"  says  Prof.  Roth. 

The  most  ardent  of  forest  and  forest  land  protection  advocates 
have  no  idea  of  arguing  for  a  force  of  regular  forest  fire  fighters  that 
would  take  the  place  of  any  such  public  co-operation  as  this — rather, 
to  provide,  a  standing  force  that  would  inspire  the  natives  to  greater 
effort  of  co-operation,  because  of  its  visible  proof  that  the  state 
recognizes  the  size  of  the  problem,  the  danger  to  lives  and  property, 
and  its  determination  to  quit  shirking  its  own  share  of  the  labor 
and  cost.  ,  i  ..4gj.  tj(,  ***** 

WHAT  PEOPLE  WANTED. 

Many  things  could  be  set  down  in  explanation  of  the  riteagerness 
of  Michigan's  professional  forest  fire  protection  organization  and  the 
way  it  works. 

In  the  first  place,  this  organization  is  exactly  what  the  people  of 
Michigan,  through  their  Legislature,  have  said  they  want.  Warden 
Baird  has  just  demoted  the  deputy  state  warden,  William  J.  Pearson, 
of  Boyne  Falls,  who  for  years  had  charge  of  the  district  deputy 
wardens.  There  is  no  place  in  the  law  fo'r  a  deputy  state  warden. 
Pearson  was  appointed  and  his  job  laid  out  by  William  R.  Gates,  who 
was  Mr.  Baird's  predecessor. 

Last  year  was  so  bad  a  fire  year  up  north,  so  much  burned  that, 
with  the  growing  interest  in  forestry  and  waste  land  matters,  the  forest 
fire  protection  department  evidently  began  to  get  apprehensive.  They 
are  reorganizing;  and  in  so  doing  they  are  falling  back  on  the 'letter 
of  the  law  which  gives  them  being.  The  10  district  wardens  are 
hereafter  to  work  under  the  authority  and  control  of  the  State  Fish, 
Game  and  Forest  Fire  Warden — Mr.  Baird. 

MORE  ARE  NEEDED. 

More  needs  to  be  done  than  this.  The  state  warden  and  his  men 
will  need  help.  In  the  last  analysis  the  Legislature  and  the  public 
are  responsible. 

This  last  statement  is  to  make  widely  known  conditions  and 
necessities,  changes  in  laws,  and  additions  to  appropriations.  The 
fire  fighters  hustle  around  on  their  vast  job,  accomplishing  a  great 
deal,  but  overwhelmed  by  the  size  of  the  job,  nevertheless;  and  they 
are  quite  willing  to  explain  their  troubles,  if  you  take  the  trouble  to 
ask.  As  for  finding  among  themselves  a  man  who  can  and  will  stand 
up  before  the  Legislature  and  tell  the  people  of  Michigan  what  they 
ought  to  know  about  this  business,  and  boldly  state  the  necessities  of 
the  case  in  dollars  and  cents— well,  as  public  educators,  they  are  pretty 
good  fire  fighters. 

One  senses  rather  than  finds  in  tangible  substance  the  fact  of  the 
Subordination  of  fire  fighting  to  game  interests.  To  one  coming  into 
the  state  warden's  office  from  days  and  weeks  in  the  up-state  forests 


and  slash  lands  and  isolated  farms  on  the  clay  oases  in  the  sand  coun- 
try, the  old,  old  fallacies  about  the  woods  and  the  clearings  are  clearly 
perceptible,  lurking  in  shadowy  corners.  All  these  people  are  Michi- 
gan men,  most  of  them  native  to  the  soil  of  the  barren  lands  or  next 
door  neighbors — steeped  in  the  traditions  of  the  north  country. 

"The  early  settler  regarded  the  forest  as  a  foe  to  be  conquered.  It 
impeded  agriculture,  and  it  harbored  wild  beasts,"  said  Orlando  F. 
Barnes  the  other  day.  He  is  chairman  of  the  State  Board  of  Tax 
Commissioners,  and  was  discussing  laws  that  are  inimical  in  their 
effects  to  the  restoration  of  forests  on  bankrupt  lands. 

It  is  not  fanciful  to  suspect  that  the  age-old  tradition  has  its  oper- 
ative effect  in  the  Michigan  forest  fire  protection  organization. 

JUST  ANOTHER  ASPECT. 

And  there  is  another  fact,  especially  appealing  to  the  official  mind. 
The  game  department  pays  its  own  way;  the  fire  protection  depart- 
ment, naturally,  does  not.  Every  dollar  spent  educating  the  north- 
woods  public  in  how  not  to  start  fires,  every  dollar  spent  stopping  the 
fires  when  they  start  by  act  of  man  or  act  of  Providence  in  sending  a 
lightning  bolt  on  an  old  and  dry  jack  pine  or  a  heap  of  slash,  has  to 
come  from  the  Legislature,  that  is  from  the  taxpayer.  And  if  the 
public  official,  on  the  average,  isn't  modest  about  asking  for  money, 
he  is  at  least  cautious  about  what  he  asks  it  for.  And  so  long  as  so  few 
people  realize  how  penny-wise  and  pound-foolish  it  is  to  let  the  north 
country  burn,  just  so  long,  undoubtedly,  will  the  forest  fire  protection 
arm  of  the  state  government  hesitate  to  make  its  legitimate  monetary 
needs  known. 

Its  legitimate  money  needs  are  known,  at  least  have  been  figured 
out  by  one  man  having  as  good  knowledge  of  the  whole  problem  as 
any  man  in  Michigan.  Prof.  Roth  has  done  it.  Besides  being  one  of 
the  world's  foremost  teachers  of  forestry,  he  has  been  Michigan's 
forester  in  years  past,  planted  with  his  own  hands  waste  areas  up  in 
Roscommon  and  Crawford  counties  and  along  the  Au  Sable  River. 

HAS  PREPARED  FIGURES. 

He  has  prepared  figures  for  a  forthcoming  report  of  the  Public 
Domain  Commission.  In  Prof.  Roth's  calculated  study  of  the  problem 
the  citizen  who  foots  the  bills  will  have  something  clear,  concise  and 
determinative  to  go  by. 

Before  Prof.  Roth's  figures  are  presented  it  remains  to  be  told 
what  the  fire  protection  organization  is  getting  now.  The  report  of 
the  game,  fish  and  forest  fire  commissioner,  in  the  Public  Domain 
Commission  report  for  1916-18,  covers  eleven  and  two-thirds  pages 
for  game,  and  has  a  one-page  summary  for  the  forest  fire  report. 
Turning  back  to  the  biennial  report  preceding,  one  finds  eight  pages 
in  the  fire  report — six  pages  of  tables  giving  dates,  areas  and  damage 
wrought  by  fires,  and  costs  of  extinguishment.  From  July  1,  1914,  to 
June  30,  1916,  what  fires  were  put  out  and  didn't  burn  out,  did  $8,276 
damage  in  the  Upper  Peninsula,  and  cost  $2,743.45  to  put  out;  in  the 
Lower  Peninsula  they  did  damage,  according  to  this  report,  of  $24,827 
and  cost  $6,842  to  extinguish.  In  the  1916-18  period  the  cost  to  put 
out  fires  totals  $12,808.  Putting  out  fires  is  small  part  of  the  fire 
fighters'  work.  They  have  to  patrol  the  lands,  post  notices,  put  up 
towers  and  phone  lines  for  watchmen,  and  do  many  other  things. 

EXACT  COST  LACKING. 

The  exact  total  cost  of  forest  protection,  outside  of  the  public 
domain  devoted  to  state  forests,  is  impossible  to  get  at,  because  the 

—27— 


accounts  are  mixed  with  the  fish  and  game  accounts,  as  is  natural,  the 
same  men  doing  the  same  work  in  the  same  department. 

The  one  definite  figure  obtainable  is  in  the  Auditor-General's 
report,  where  there  is  an  item,  "forest  fires,  paid  for  suppression  of," 
and  this  item,  in  the  report  of  1918,  is  $43,434.66.  This  is  the  amount 
for  the  fiscal  year  ending  June  30,  1918,  and  it  includes  the  two-thirds 
of  the  aggregate  amount  paid  by  the  state  as  days'  wages  to  emer- 
gency fire  fighters,  the  township  paying  the  other  third. 

More  particularly  how  the  money  was  spent  will  appear  in  the 
comparison  that  will  be  printed  later  along  with  Prof.  Roth's 
estimate  of  what  should  be  spent. 


ARTICLE  VI. 

Michigan  spends  $50,000  a  year  putting  out  forest  fires.  More  is 
spent  in  addition  maintaining  the  skeleton  forest  and  forest  land  pro- 
tection organization  on  the  millions  of  acres  needing  protection  and 
which  lie  outside  the  otherwise  protected  areas,  of  the  state  forests, 
under  the  management  of  the  Public  Domain  Commission.  The 
$50,000  plus,  is  expended  by  the  State  Game,  Fish  and  Forest  Fire  De- 
partment. The  plus  amount,  spent  for  maintenance  of  the  standing 
organization  and  its  equipment,  never  reaches  $100,00  in  a  single  year. 

Michigan  gets  off  cheaply.  It  does  until  one  comes  to  reckon  up 
the  fire  damage  and  balance  it  against  the  expenditure.  An  ordinary 
business  corporation  would  fire  a  general  manager  who  boasted  about 
how  little  fire  hose  he  caused  to  be  bought  in  a  year,  when  the  opposite 
page  of  the  ledger  carried  an  account  of  fire  loss  that  was  over  27 
times  the  cost  of  hose  bought.  That  is  what  forest  fire  "protection" 
and  forest  fire  damage  amount  to  in  Michigan,  from  the  comparative 
point  of  view. 

The  annual  loss  of  merchantable  timber  has  been  in  recent  years 
$2,00,000  a  year,  timbermen  say  in  formal  reports.  Add  to  this  a  mod- 
est estimate  of  soil  damage,  of  $5  an  acre — Prof.  Roth's  figure — and 
you  would  have  to  add  to  these  estimates  another  big  figure  for  dam- 
age done  to  second  growth,  not  yet  large  enough  for  commercial  use, 
but  stock  in  hand,  just  as  much  so  as  calves  and  colts  on  a  livestock 
farm.  This  last  figure  nobody  has  mentioned,  so  far  as  known.  When 
you  add  them  all  together  and  balance  them  against  the  $50,000  to 
$100,000  investment  in  fire  fighting  you  quickly  perceive  that  the  in- 
vestment is  so  smair  that  you  wonder  the  waste  has  been  allowed  to 
go  on  so  long.  The  answer  is  that  so  few  people  have  had  the  facts. 

EUROPE'S  FORESTS  PAY. 

Forest  protection  is  better  in  Europe,  where  they  have  state  and 
municipal  tracts  of  woodland  that  pay  revenues  to  the  public. 

There  they  began  restoring  forests  200  years  ago  and  have  in  some 
countries  kept  pace  with  forest  devastation.  In  the  better  adminis- 
tered areas,  as  in  Saxony,  forest  protection  costs  from  15  to  30  cents 
an  acre.  These  forests  pay  not  only  expenses  but  a  profit  into  the 
public  treasury. 

For  Michigan,  which  is  just  beginning  the  work  of  forest 
reclamation,  money  for  protection  will  have  to  be  invested,  and  the 
state  will  have  to  wait  upon  rehabilitation  of  existing  forests  and 
growth  of  new  forests  to  get  its  money  back — and  wait  still  longer 
for  profits.  But  a  beginning  can  not  be  made  without  spending  money 
for  adequate  protection  of  what  now  exists  and  what  is  being  brought 
into  existence. 

— 28— 


It  requires  an  outlay  of  S  cents  an  acre  on  a  15,000,000-acre  area 
requiring  protection.  It  will  cost,  in  fact,  10  cents  an  acre  adequately 
to  protect  the  10,000,000  of  idle  cut-over  lands  and  the  5,000,000  acres 
which  are  not  idle  but  timber  stocked.  Five  of  the  10  cents  for  each 
acre,  however,  will  be  furnished  half  the  protection,  at  least,  at  no  cost 
to  the  state.  Timber  owners  have  their  own  protection  organizations; 
mills  shut  down  and  whole  towns  turn  out  when  there  are  big  fires. 
The  public  comes  in  without  expectation  of  repayment  when  the  job 
is  at  its  worst  and  costs  the  most. 

$550,000  NECESSARY. 

"If  the  state  will  spend  $500,000  a  year  on  organization  and 
improvements,  the  next  bad  fire  season  will  not  find  the  people 
unprepared  and  helpless,"  says  Prof.  Roth. 

A  detailed  estimate  of  the  cost  that  should  be  paid  out  by  the  state, 
independent  of  private  help,  and  aiming  to  encourage  co-operative 
effort  on  the  part  of  the  public,  by  Prof.  Roth,  exceeds  his  offhand 
estimate  by  $50,000.  Here  is  Mr.  Roth's  summary  of  "a  reasonable, 
practical  minimum  for  effective  fire  protection  in  Michigan  annually 
to  be  expended  for  the  next  20  years": 

State  Fire  Warden,  at  $6,000  and  expenses $  10,000 

30  County  Wardens,  at  $2,000  and  expenses 90,000 

Supervisors    as    Wardens,    at    $100 .40,000 

500  special    Wardens,   at   $200 ' 100,000 

Clerks,    printing,    etc 10,000 

Improvements,    equipment,    etc 200,000 

Fire  fighting,  extra  help,  ordinary  years. 100,000 

Total .$550,000 

For  emergency  years,  a  special  standing  fund  of  $500,000  for  fire 
Anting. 

WOULD  LEVY  TAX. 

To  raise  this  money,  Prof.  Roth  would  have  the  state  levy  a  special 
tax  of  two  cents  an  acre  on  all  cut-over  lands  not  part  of  actual  farms; 
a  special  tax  of  five  cents  an  acre  on  all  standing  timber,  and  apportion 
to  the  forest  protection  fund  a  part  of  all  gun  and  hunting  license 
money.  Generally,  he  says,  this  would  yield  the  following  returns 
for  forest  protection: 

Tax  on  cut-over  lands   (10,000,000  acres) $200,000 

Tax  on   standing  timber   (4,000,000  acres) 200,000 

Part  of  game  protection  fund,  etc 150,000 

Total     '. $550,000 

A  special  tax  on  land  for  forest  protection  is  no  innovation,  he 
points  out.  It  has  been  in  effect  in  Oregon  since  1913.  Voluntary 
organizations  of  timber  owners  in  all  the  timbered  states  pay  acre 
assessments,  some  of  them  as  high  as  25  cents  an  acre,  where  timber 
tands  are  especially  valuable  and  protection  difficult.  The  average 
assessment  runs  from  five  to  ten  cents  an  acre. 

URGES    EDUCATION. 

Prof.  Roth  says  educative  work  in  forest  protection  should  begin 
in  earnest.  The  public  should  be  fully  informed  what  fires  in  the 
Northland  mean  in  loss  of  forest  products,  deterioration  of  soil,  de- 

—29— 


\stfuction  to  animal  life,  loss  in  revenues  derived  from  the  patronage 
of  sportsmen,  and  loss  in  revenues  that  might  be  derived  from  tourist 
traffic  and  resorters  were  the  country  saved  from  fire  and  made  more 
attractive.  More  specifically,  in  the  application  of  dollars  to  the 
problem,  he  says,  supervisors  should  continue  as  fire  wardens,  on 
definite  yearly  pay,  as  stated  in  the  table  above.  He  would  have  a  fire 
warden  for  each  county  and  30  wardens  in  the  fire  area,  instead  of  the 
10  district  wardens,  as  now.  He  would  pay  them  about  what  the 
district  wardens  are  getting  now. 

He  would  have  the  state  warden  at  Lansing  empowered  to  employ 
at  least  500  patrolmen,  or  rangers,  which  is  the  meaning  of  "special 
wardens"  in  the  table.  These  would  be  men  selected,  so  far  as  pos- 
sible, among  the  local  populations  and  would  serve  when  called  out. 
More  fire  towers  and  phones  and  some  fire  lines  to  break  up  the  most 
dangerous  bodies  of  slash  are  also  comtemplated  in  the  program. 
There  are  now  three  fire  towers  standing  in  the  vast  area  of  the  fire 
country,  and  two  or  three  more  ready  to  go  up,  according  to  informa- 
tion furnished  at  the  state  warden's  office.  There  are  no  fire  lines 
whatever  on  this  vast  territory  outside  the  state  forests. 

RESTOCK   WITH    TREES. 

A  proposal  to  spend  $550,000  a  year  for  forest  protection,  outside 
the  650H00  acres  of  the  public  domain,  the  most  of  which  the  State 
Forester  will  protect  at  a  separate  cost,  will  appeal  to  some  Michigan 
citizens  as  too  much,  to  some  others  as  none  too  much,  depending  on 
the  point  of  view.  The  point  of  view  of  some  who  think  the  figure 
looks  large  may  shift  a  little  with  further  consideration  of  what  the 
financial  returns  are  for  protection  investment.  It  is  always  to  be 
borne  in  mind  that  the  proposition  is  to  take  a  first  step  necessary 
to  reclamation  of  the  idle  lands  by  restocking  them  with  trees: 
Propagation  of  forests  by  assistance  to  nature  is  not  conceivable 
without  protection.  All  authorities,  state  and  national,  have  said  that 
many  times. 

P,  S.  Lovejoy,  co-laborer  with  Prof.  Roth,  in  the  -University  of 
Michigan  forestry  department,  whose  comprehensive  article  led  this 
series,  has  written  of  "Timber  Values  as  Affected  by  Fire  Hazard." 
He  speaks  only  of  one  of  the  elements  of  value  to  be  reckoned  on  when 
waste  lands  are  made  to  grow  forests.  That  is  merchantable  timber. 

FIRES  IRREPARABLE. 

"A  burned  factory,"  he  points  out,  "can  be  rebuilt;  a  burned  forest 
cannot  be  replaced" — meaning,  not  without  great  lapse  of  time.  Hence 
forest  fires  do  what  is  relatively  irreparable  damage.  Hence  it  must 
rationally  be  expected  that  forest  protection  will  cost  more  in  propor- 
tion to  assessed  valuation  at  any  given  date  than  will  fire  insurance 
on  a  building  or  a  business. 

Forest  insurance  cannot  be  purchased  in  this  country. 

Insurance  c'harges  buy  indemnification  for  losses  and  replacement 
of  burned  property.  As  has  been  explained,  the  system  won't  apply 
where  there  can  be  no  replacement  of  the  burned  property — or  at  least 
the  insurance  companies  take  that  view.  The  argument  is,  therefore, 
that  it  must  be  expected  that  forest  protection  will  cost  more  than 
insurance.  Protection  must  be  raised  to  the  highest  possible  point  of 
efficiency  to  avoid  irrecoverable  losses. 

It  will  not  strike  the  average  reader  that  to  put  $550,000  a  year 
into  protection  instead  of  less  than  $100,000  in  t'he  effort  to  cut  down  an 
annual  loss  in  timber,  second  growth  and  land  values  easily  approximat- 

—30— 


ing  $3,000,000  a  year,  is  such  a  steep.  proposition.  It  will  look  even  less 
when  it  is  reflected  that  something  must  be  done  to  make  recreation  of 
the  forest  a  really  practicable  undertaking. 

MOST  FOR  PROTECTION. 

J.  Girvin  Peters,  of  the  United  Slates  forest  service,  he  who  has 
charge  of  co-operation  with  the  states,  says: 

"It  is  significant  that  many  states  whose  forest  work  was  begun 
mainly  along  experimental  lines  are  now  giving  the  larger  part  of  their 
time  and  t'heir  appropriation  for  forestry  to  fire  protection." 

More  money  for  the  fire  fighters  to  work  with  is  not  the  only  thing 
needed  —  they  need  sme  changes  in  these  laws.  Nothing  radical  ap- 
pears to  be  desired.  Nobody  is  advocating  divorcement  of  the  state 
fire  warden's  office  from  the  state  game  warden's  office.  There  are  too 
rnny  good  arguments  for  keeping  them  together.  The  administrative 
work  is  much  th  same,  the  territory  is  t'he  same,  and  the  ultimate 
aim  is  the  same  —  conservation  of  the  state's  resources  and  building 
them  up.  Game.  protection  involves  forest  protection;  the  only  wonder 
is  that  the  game  protectors  do  not  seem  to  realize  how  necessary  are 
forests  to  game  interests. 

NEED  BETTER  LAWS. 

There  are  laws  in  some  states  requiring  every  timber  owner  to 
provide  a  patrol  system  satisfactory  to  the  state  authorities.  Other- 
wise the  state  provides  it  and  taxes  the  owner  for  it.  Michigan's  two 
private  co-operative  forest  protection  organizations,  one  in  the  Upper 
and  one  in  t'he  Lower  Peninsula,  are  not  as  active,  of  recent  years,  as 
formerly. 

Slash  disposal  laws  are  better  defined  and  more  effective  in  some 
states  than  in  Michigan.  In  this  state,  while  the  forest  fire  protec- 
tion law  provides  that  the  state  fire  warden  and  his  men  "may  enter 
upon  lands  and  remove  or  destroy  brush,  and  other  dangerous  com- 
bustible material  wherever  necessary,"  there  is  nowhere  in  the  vast 
fire  area  perceptible  any  systematic  purpose  or  effort  to  reduce  the 
fire  hazard  at  this,  its  starting  point.  It  appears  t'hat  the  "may"  of 
the  statute  might  well  be  made  to  read  "shall." 

Laws  penalizing  careless  and  malicious  setting  of  fires  that  spread 
and  cause  great  damage  may  be  adequate  enough,  as  statutes,  but  they 
are  not  enforced  with  anywhere  near  the  vigor  that  the  game  laws 
are  enforced.  The  records  of  prosecutions  stand  easily  10  to  1  in 
favor  of  the  game  laws. 

STILL  WASTE  TIMBER. 

Harvesting  of  timber  goes  on  in  this  state.  The  cut  approximates 
1,000,000  feet  of  hardwood  a  year,  and  100,000  acres  are  being  added 
every  year  to  the  millions  o.f  acres  of  cut-over  lands.  And  one  hears 
all  through  the  North  tales  of  shiftless  practices  by  lumbermen  that 
rival  tales  of  the  older  days  —  tops  and  branches  left  lying,  in  quite  the 
fashion  that  the  old-timers  created  the  burnt-over  slash  lands  all  over 
the  North  Country.  Some  states  have  laws  regulating  the  cutting  of 
timber  on  private  lands,  and  it  appears  on  t'he  face  of  it  that  if  Michi- 
gen  were  to  put  up  $550,000  or  anything  like  that  for  fire  protection, 
laws  to  make  the  slash  makers  take  more  care  than  they  do  would  be 
well  justified. 

There  are  other  legal  matters  to  be  considered,  as  well  as  the  tax 
laws.  One  at  least  of  which  operates  with  the  force  of-a  law  of  nature 
to  discourage  th»  attempts  ©f  private  owners  to  re-grow  forests;  but 


that  is  a  subject  that  pertains  rather  to  restoration  of  forests  than  to 
t'heir  destruction,  anct  will  be  treated  of  when  reforestation  is  taken  up. 
Having  considered  something  of  the  necessities  preliminary  to  the 
problem  of  restocking  the  idle  acres  it  remains  to  be  found  out  what  is 
being  done  and  can  be  done  to  restock.  The  point  of  attack  for  that 
study  is  logically  the  forest  reservations  of  the  Public  Domain  Com- 
mission, where  beginnings  have  been  made,  and  to  that  area  of  the  in- 
quiry, the  state  forests,  we  now  return. 


ARTICLE  VII. 

On  millions  of  acres  outside  the  state  forests  the  problem  first  to 
be  faced,  as  we  have  seen,  is  reduction  of  the  fire  menace  as  an  as- 
sistance to  nature  in  her  efforts  to  reproduce  the  useful  trees,  later 
to  assist  nature  by  planting. 

On  the  650,000  acres  allotted  to  the  Public  Domain  Commission 
for  state  forest  reservations,  the  fire  problem  is  well  in  hand,  by  con- 
trast with  conditions  outside.  Nature  is  being  given  her  chance,  and, 
more,  nature  is  being  assisted.  The  whole  program  is  to  restore  to 
the  millions  of  acres  of  devastated  lands  up  north  the  forest  industry. 
About  $55,000  a  year  is  being  spent  to  this  end. 

AN   INFANT   INDUSTRY. 

Remember  that  you  are  about  to  scrutinize  an  infant  industry.  So 
infantile  that  you  are  asked  ,to  examine  the  industry  in  the  very  mak- 
ings of  it,  from  practically  nothing.  It  will  be  found  to  have  some  of 
the  puny,  weakling  aspects  of  a  thing  newly  born.  It  is  only  about  15 
years  old  in  this  state.  It  will  be  45  years  longer  growing  out  of  ado- 
lescense;  for  it  takes  on  the  average  60  years  for  suc'h  a  tree  as  those 
planted  by  the  state  forester  to  reach  a  size  that  makes  a  lumberman^ 
covetous.  The  pulpwood  man  and  the  chemical  wood  man,  not  to 
mention  the  /barrel  and  box  men  and  a  host  of  others  who  can  make 
money  scavenging  forests,  will  be  coming  down  on  our  youthful  for- 
ests long  before  the  60-year  term  is  up.  They  are  finding  much  now 
in  protected  forest  areas,  and  they  would  find  much  more  in  10  to  15 
years  if  fires  were  kept  out. 

Of  the  Public  Domain  Commission's  650,000  acres  only  156,158 
acres  have  to  date  been  organized  as  a  forest  reserve.  One  has  to  put 
in  that  "only,"  for  large  as  the  aggregate  state  forests  are,  one 
can  not  forget  that  100,000  acres  of  cut-over  are  being  added  to  the  idle 
land  area  of  this  state  every  year. 

The  state  forest  domain  is  in  eight  forests.  The  newest  one  was 
"opened"  last  summer.  That  is  the  Pigeon  River  reserve,  in  south  cen- 
tral Cheboygan  county.  "Opening"  a  state  forest,  as  has  been  else- 
where mentioned,  consists  in  running  the  evxterior  boundary  fines,  put- 
ting up  living  quarters  for  the  forester's  men,  a  barn,  at  least  one  watch- 
tower,  telephone  lines,  then  beginning  construction  of  fire  lines  and 
planting. 

The  other  seven  state  forests,  named  in  the  chronological  order  of 
their  opening,  are:  Higgins  Lake,  Houghton  Lake,  Fife  Lake,  Lake 
Superior,  Ogemaw,  Presque  Isle,  Alpena.  There  is,  besides,  a  tract 
of  virgin  white  pine,  Interlochen  State  park,  in  Grand  Traverse  county, 
where  the  state  forester  gets  much  seed,  but  does  not  pursue  reclama- 
tion activities.  0 

A—  —32— 


FORESTS  SPREAD  OVER  STATE. 

The  eight  state  forests  mentioned  are  widely  dispersed  through  the 
barren  lands,  and  they  are  of  diverse  areas.  The  Lake  Superior  forest, 
on  the  north  shore  of  Luce  County  and  beginning  about  20  miles 
west  of  Whitefish  bay,  runs  westward  to  the  Alger  County  line  in  a 
strip  30  miles  long  and  six  miles  deep.  It  is  the  largest,  embracing 
over  62,000  acres.  The  Ogemaw  forest,  just  above  West  Branch — the 
Michigan  Central  railroad  line,  is  the  smallest— -4,200  acres.  A  "map 
of  the  state  forests,"  issued  by  the  Public  Domain  Commission,  neatly 
spotted  in  blue  to  show  the  forest  areas,  shows  74  of -these,  one  of 
them  down  as  far  as  Gratiot  County;  but  this  map  reflects  plans  and 
aspirations,  not  performances.  The  eight  largest  areas  have  been 
opened.  The  others  will  be,  some  time,  and  they  will  be  larger  than 
they  now  are.  The  commission  is  constantly  making  deals  to  extend 
the  forest  reserve  lines  and  to  buy  out  such  private  parties  as  own 
little  tracts  within  the  confines  of  all  the  areas. 

If  you  ever  take  it  into  your  head  to  have  a  look  at  the  Michigan 
enterprise  of  reclothing  the  barren  lands  with  forests,  the  place  to  be- 
gin is  at  the  Higgins  Lake  reserve.  Here  are  field  headquarters.  Here 
is  the  state  nursery,  and  the  field  office  of  the  state  forester.  His 
business  office  is  in  Grayling,  12  miles  distant. 

The  ride  from  the  railway  station,  past  the  state  military  reservation 
at  Portage  Lake,  is  over  graveled  roads  about  half  the  way,  then  over 
the  typical  sand  roads  of  the  cut-over  country.  The  end  of  the  road 
is  a  group  of  modern  buildings  on  the  sh'ore  of  Higgins  Lake — a 
crystal  clear  body  of  water  nine  miles  long  and  three  miles  wide,  its 
shoreline  sparsely  pre-empted  by  resorters,  as  yet,  but  gaining  yearly 
in  popularity. 

The  largest  building  at  forestry  headquarters  is  the  two-story 
cement  block  residence  of  the  custodian,  electric  lighted  and  steam 
heated.  All  the  buildings  requiring  it  have  running  water.  A  hydraulic" 
ram  operating  in  a  swale  between  the  reservation  buildings  and  the 
lake  shore,  where  a  spring  creek  has  been  dammed  to  form  a  pond 
in  front  of  headquarters,  supplies  the  buildings  here  and  the  nursery, 
back  from  the  lake  a  couple  of  minutes'  walk. 

Each  of  the  opened  forests  has  a  resident  custodian.  The  custodian 
at  the  Higgins  Lake  reserve  is  also  superintendent  of  the  nursery. 

SUPPLIES  ALL  FORESTS. 

This  nursery  is  the  source  of  supply  of  seeding  trees  for  all  the 
forests.  It  also  supplies  seedlings  at  cost  price  to  private  persons,  in 
lots  of  never  less  than  500  little  trees.  The  nursery  area  is  less  than  ' 
30  acres,  and  the  building  is  not  much  to  look  at — a  mere  shed;  but 
the  nursery  grows  seedling  trees  by  the  millions  every  year.  The 
planting  practice,  on  land  wholly  denuded,  is  to  put  in  1,700  seedlings 
to  the  acre.  An  acre  with  50  full  grown  trees  on  it  is  a  good  "stand." 
The  surplusage  provided  in  planting  is  the  allowance  for  loss  by  death, 
and  the  thinning  processes  pursued  in  silviculture — raising  forests  as  a 
crop. 

"It  is  high  time  that  we  began  cropping  our  forest  lands  instead 
of  mining  them,"  as  Orlando  F.  Barns  recently  remarked. 

Artificial  planting  by  the  state  began  back  in  1904,  on  a  very  small 
scale  with  the  Higgins  and  the  Houghton  Lake  reserves  as  the  operat- 
ing grounds.  Prof.  Roth  was  then  in  charge  of  the  field  work. 

The  appropriation  at  that  time  was  but  $7,500  a  year.     By  the  close 

—33— 


of  the  fiscal  year  1918  the  commission  was  expending  $54,702  for  all 
purposes  on  the  seven  forest  reserves.  In  the  last  two  years  the 
opening  of  the  Pigeon  River  Reserve  has  been  the  largest  work.  It 
cost,  before  the  war,  $6,000  to  open  a  state  forest.  Now  it  costs 
$12,000  to  $13,000. 

"Forestry  is  a  financial  undertaking,  pure  and  simple.  It's  got 
to  be  made  to  pay  to  succeed,"  State  Forester  Marcus  Schaaf 
remarked  to  the  writer  while  he  was  wandering  around  the  reserva- 
tion. And^every  minute  of  every  day  that  one  spends  in  watching 
the  operations  of  Michigan's  forestry  department  he  is  reminded  of 
this  point  of  view. 

KNOWS  VALUE  OF  TREES. 

The  forester  looks  upon  his  work  as  the  labor  of  raising  a  crop  of 
commercial  wood  prdducts — lumber,  pulp  wood,  chemical  wood,  ties, 
posts  and  poles,  and  all  the  rest.  He  knows  the  value  of  forest  cover 
to  animal  life,  appreciates  the  sportsman's  and  the  tourist's  interests, 
realizes  the  health  and  scenic  value  to  a  state's  general  population  of 
living  woods  in  place  of  barren  lands;  but  when  he  reckons  costs  and 
places  them  alongside  yields  to  decide  whether  he  is  making  progress 
or  not,  he  reckons  in  board  feet  and  cords.  v 

He  doesn't  even  reckon  in  what  is  of  most  importance  to  the  citizen 
wherever  he  lives.  This  is  the  value  to  the  state  of  RE-ESTABLISH- 
ING ON  IDLE  LANDS  AN  INDUSTRY  THAT  HAS  BEEN 
WIPED  OUT,  AND  RE-ESTABLISHING  IT  IN  PERPETUITY, 
that  dying  towns  may  come  back  to  life,  populations  that  are  drifting 
away  because  employment  is  gone  may  find  labor  restored  to  them, 
a  whole  country  blighted  made  new  again. 

Growing  a  forest  is  a  long-time  job,  involving  a  large  investment 
at  a  low  rate  of  interest — from  2  to  3  per  cent — and  it  is  up  to  the 
forester  to  show  that,  aside  from  what  may  be  called  the  general 
benefits  to  society,  he  must  show  financial  benefit  to  the  investor  first 
of  all. 

Whatever  may  have  been  accomplished  to  date  in  this  state  in 
actual  work,  the  state  has  a  definite  plan  for  the  work,  and  it  proves 
up  successfully  on  the  basis  of  the  forester's  severe  reckoning — it  must 
be  shown  that  it  pays. 

Michigan's  state  forester  has  the  problem  of  restocking  what  are 
virtually  denuded  lands.  It  has  been  pointed  out  before  that  this 
state-owned  land,  reverted  to  the  state  because  of  non-payment  of 
taxes,  is  naturally  the  poorest  land  anywhere  in  the  area  of  bankrupt 
acres.  , 

"It  is  obvious  that  no  receipts  may  be  expected  during  the  first 
60  years,"  said  Mr.  Schaaf. 

He  was  still  speaking  of  commercial  timber.  There  are  small 
annual  revenues  all  the  time — from  sale  of  nursery  product,  sale  of 
second  growth  annually  cut  off  in  process  of  giving  the  most  forward 
growth  its  chance  to  develop,  and  there  is  destined  to  be  a  larger 
revenue  derivable  from  thinnings  and  forest  scavenging  as  certain 
industries  develop  and  needs  increase.  Pulp  and  paper  makers  are 
taking  kinds  of  wood  nowadays  they  snorted  at  a  few  years  ago,  and 
there  is  the  chemical  wood  industry  —  using  up  small  stuff  from 
hardwood  forests  and  turning  out  charcoal,  acetate  of  lime  and  wood 
alcohol.  Michigan  leads  all  the  states  in  this  latter  industry.  But,  says 
the  state  forester — — 


"It  must  be  apparent  to  any  reasonable  minded  person  that  the 
whole  proposition  is  one  in  which  the  investor,  in  this  case  the  state, 
must  be  willing  to  make  considerable  financial  outlay  and  forego  im- 
mediate returns  for  future  profits.  It  is  therefore  a  foregone  conclu- 
sion that,  starting  with  practically  nothing,  the  expenditures  accumu- 
lated during  the  first  60-year  period,  will  be  vastly  in  excess  of  the 
meager  receipts  that  may  be  expected  in  the  meantime.  Such  invest- 
ments must  be  made  in  order  to  create  and  build  up  the  working  capi- 
tal of  the  forest,  and  theoretically  at  least  not  until  1978,  the  first  year 
of  the  second  period  of  rotation,  will  a  substantial  output  be  realized 
and  the  investment  begin  to  return  interest  From  that  time  forward, 
'however,  the  returns  will  continue  in  perpetuity  and  in  the  same 
amount,  so  long  as  the  forest  working  capital  is  not  impaired." 

REAL  PROFIT  BEGINS  EARLY. 

Mr.  Schaaf  was  here  dating  his  reckoning  from  1917  and  looking 
forward  to  the.  first  harvest  of  completely  matured  timber  at  the  end 
of  60  years.  Sixty,  years  would  be  a  long  time  for  the  average  citizen 
to  look  for  returns  on  the  tax  money  he  is  asked  to  put  into  a  state 
forest  industry.  But  the  case  isn't  really  quite  as  bad  as  that. 

A  recent  special  report  of  the  forester  carries  tabular  statements 
showing  estimated  outlay  and  estimated  accretions  of  timber  values, 
year  by  year,  for  the  60-year  period  and  beyond.  It  becomes  perfectly 
apparent  to  the  layman  studying  these  figures  that  this  important  fact 
lies  buried  in  fhem. 

The  increment  of  value  in  the  forest  catches  up  with  the  total  of 
increasing  investment  long  before  the  60  years  expire.  The  60  years 
mark  the  first  harvest  period — the  first  collection  date,  and  when  the 
harvest  is  realized  it  pays  much  more  than  the  cost  of  production. 
Back  in  the  years  before  that  date  lies  the  point  where  value  repre- 
sented in  t'he  still  growing  tree  overlaps  the  cost  of  growing  it.  It  is 
not  harvested  then,  of  course,  because  by  not  cutting  it,  it  then  begins 
to  leave  cost  farther  and  fart'her  behind  in  the  race  between  cost  and 
profit. 

The  rotation-periods — in  a  sense  harvesting  periods — for  forests  are 
the  same  for  all  forests  of  similar  tree  population.  The  time  element 
is  fixed,  but  when  it  comes  to  the  matter  of  actual  dollars  invested  in 
a  forest,  the  forest  area  has  to  come  into  the  reckoning. 

me  state  forester,  in  his  calculations  in  'his  report,  worked  with 
a  definite  area  in  mind.  This  was  4,500  acres  for  each  year.  That  is 
the  planting  plan  of  the  Michigan  Public  Domain  Commission,  that 
many  new  acres  of  new  planting  to  be  added  to  the  replanted  areas 
in  the  state  forests  every  12  months.  The  performance  has  been  less 
than  2,000  acres  a  year. 

Two  causes  have  operated  to  keep  the  planting  operations  down  to  a 
limit  of  less  than  "half  of  what  the  commission  wants  to  do,  is  able 
to  do  with  the  product  of  its  Higgins  Lake  nursery  as  it  is  equipped 
today.  These  causes  have  been,  first,  lack  of  money,  and,  second, 
lack  of  men  in  some  cases  even  when  they  had  money  for  wages  and 
to  buy  tools  and  equipment. 

The  program  calls  for  opening  two  new  forests  each  year.  That 
has  not  been  done.  None  were  opened  during  the  war  period,  and 
but  one  since  the  war  ended.  There  has  been  labor  available,  in  some 
districts  where  forests  might  have  been  opened,  but  not-enough  money 
for  the  purpose.  The  $55,000  a  year  undoubtedly  i§  not  enough  to  carry 

-35— 


out  even  the  2,000-acre  planting  plan  of  the  past,  considering  rises  in 
costs.  It  certainly  is  not  enough  to  carry  out  the  4,500-acre  planting 
industry. 

Why  exactly  4,500  acres,  with  some  concrete  facts  in  relation  to 
decided  on  as  the  real  requirement  of  Michigan's  state-owned  forest 
costs  and  returns  will  be  the  leading  topic  of  the  next  article. 


ARTICLE  VIII. 

In  what  has  recently  been  written  in  these  articles  on  the  reclama- 
tion of  Michigan  bankrupt  lands  by  means  of  a  plan  to  restore  the 
forests  that  once  grew  on  them,  the  word  "rotation"  has  been  several 
times  used,  and  probably  not  clearly  understood  by  some  readers. 

Rotation  of  crop,  in  the  case  of  a  forest  crop,  means  substantially 
that  while  two-year-old  seedling  trees  are  being  taken  out  of  the 
nursery  and  planted  on  the  barren  lands  or  in  open  spaces  in  the 
woods,  earlier  plantings  have  been  growing  toward  maturity,  each 
year's  planted  area  being  a  12-month  step  toward  the  goal.  In  the 
future  years,  when  the  state  forester  and  his  men  shall  begin 
harvesting  Michigan's  first  timber  crop,  others  of  his  men  will  be 
setting  out  on  other  lands  "trees"  that  would  make  you  laugh  to  look 
at,  if  you  were  wholly  uninformed  and  out  of  sympathy  with  the 
work.  These  seedlings  two  years  old  are  about  as  high  out  of  the 
ground  as  your  shoetop,  and  it  is  not  till  you  fall  to  admiring  a  sturdy 
young  tree  shoulder  high  in  the  field  and  have  been  told  that  it  has 
been  there,  say,  seven  years,  that  you  begin  to  realize  what  forestry 
and  forest  cropping  means. 

BASIS  OF  PLAN. 

Cutting  off  the  matured  crop  at  the  end  of  the  row  and  setting  out 
spindling  plants  at  the  nursery  end  means  rotating  the  crop.  A  simpler 
rotation  than  rotation  of  an  agricultural  crop,  where  one  kind  of  crop 
is  made  to  follow  another,  year  by  year — done  in  agriculture  for  the 
land's  sake,  principally. 

"Of  course  we  wouldn't  want  to  cut  off  the  whole  crop  of  trees  at 
one  time,  if  we  could,"  said  Marcus  Schaaf,  state  forester.  "It  takes 
too  long  to  grow  a  crop.  Constant  supply  of  forest  products  is  what 
is  aimed  at."  H*l«l 

This  is  the  basic  reason,  for  the  4,500-acre  planting  plan  .of  the 
Michigan  Public  Domain  Commission.  More  particularly,  the  4,500- 
acre  area  is  the  allotment  oL  total  acreage  in  view  for  annual  plantmg 
on  the  whole  enormous  state  plantation,  that  the  whole  plantation 
may  develop  each  year  its  proper  area  of  matured  crop.  No  need  to 
inquire  just  how  the  state  forester  and  the  others  arrived  at  this 
figure — one  can  afford  to  accept  something  from  the  paid  experts 
without  mangling  his  brain  trying  to  master  the  intricacies  of  the 
science. 

THE  DOLLARS  INVOLVED. 

Now,  as  to  the  dollars  involved,  in  outlay  and  return. 

It  has  been  stated,  earlier,  in  perfect  confidence,  that  t'he  $55,000 
the  commission  is  getting  cannot  be  expected  to  finance  the  2,000- 
acre  planting  plan  of  the  makeshift  present.  This  is  what  the  state 
forester  tells  the  commission  will  be  the  necessary  investment  for  the 
4,500-acre  plan  for  a  period  of  years  reaching  out  to  maturity  of  the  first 

—36— 


planted  area,  his  figures  being  based  on  the  costs  as  they  were  in  1916: 
There  will 'have  to  be  an  annual  expenditure  of  $150,000  for  the  first 

30  years;  for  the  second  30  years  an  annual  outlay  of  $217,500. 
The  total  investment  during  the  60  years  would  be  $13,365,000. 
The  receipts  at  the  end  of  the  60-year  period,  based  on  1916  timber 

values,  now  vastly  increased  and  bound  to  increase  still  more,  would 

be  $13,458,000. 

INVESTMENT'S  RETURN. 

It  is  not  to  be  assumed  from  these  figures,  however,  that  the  forests 
would  not  do  more  than  merely  gain  a  relatively  small  profit  for  the 
state  in  all  these  years.  Revenues  would  not  wait  on  maturity  of  a  crop. 
Long  before  the  race  between  outlay  and  actual  money  return  is  won 
by  the  forests,  the  forests  would  become  in  fact  self-supporting,  and 
independent  of  legislative  appropriations. 

Therefore,  it  is  not  to  be  understood  ^hat  "outlay"  and  "expendi- 
ture" of  $150,000  a  year  for  the  first  30  years,  and  $217,500  during  the 
next  30  years  means  state  appropriations.  It  means  that  the  forest 
industry  which  the  state  would  capitalize  out  of  its  pocket  would 
begin  to  put  its  money  back  into  the  business — when?  Well,  scrutiny 
of  the  elaborate  figures  of  the  forester  seems  to  show  that  they  would 
in  about  30  years.  The  date  has  to  be  guessed  at,  for  yields  and 
prices  have  to  be  guessed  at — yields  easier  to  guess  than  prices.  Con- 
sidering that  famine  in  forest  products  impends — in  lumber  and  pulp 
wood  especially — it  doesn't  wrench  one's  sense  of  probabilities  to  drag, 
the  self-supporting  date  for  a  properly  conducted  forest  forward  by 
several  years. 

INCREASE  OF  RECEIPTS. 

At  the  beginning  of  the  second  period  of  rotation,  when  the  first 
crop  would  be  cut,  says  the  forester,  the  receipts  of  that  year  would 
be  several  times  the  legislative  appropriation,  and  that  would  continue 
to  be  the  case,  indefinitely.  Then  the  forests  would  be  turning  into 
the  state's  general  fund  a  net  annual  revenue  muc'h  in  excess  of  a- 
ual  outlay. 

And  all  this,  as  the  forester  says  and  repeats,  and  wisely,  is  set 
forth  as  a  business  proposition,  pure  and  simple — board  feet  and  cords 
again,  with  no  allowance  for  reclamations  of  land  too  poor  to  pay  even 
its  taxes,  no  allowance  for  protection  of  wild  life  and  making  a  desolate 
country  attractive,  and  no  allowance  for  gain  in  community  values, 
towns  revivified  and  people  furnished  with  work  and  business. 

The  amateur  inquirer,  getting  a  sense  of  these  values,  naturally,  be- 
fore he  gets  a  sense  of  the  value  of  a  tree,  sometimes  thinks  the  forester 
is  standing  in  his  own  light  by  sticking  so  close  to  his  business  text. 
Every  man  tp  <his  trade,  however;  and  it  is  clearly  up  to  the  man  in 
the  street  to  get,  first,  the  immediate  business  argument,  since  it  is 
a  matter  of  investing  his  money  in  the  project.  When  he  has  gotten 
that,  it  is  an  open  question  whether  the  returns  in  ot'her  things  than 
money  from  timber  are  not  business  also.  Certainly  anything  that 
enters  into  the  labor  of  making  a  bankrupt  empire  first  self-supporting 
and  then  remunerative  appears  to  be  a  business  proposition. 

DUTY  OF  COMMISSION. 

One  plain  duty  of  the  Michigan  Public  Domain  Commission  is  to 
take  out  of  its  shelved  reports  the  24-page  study  of  State  Forester 
Schaa.f  with  all  the  elaborate  tables,  explaining  the  business  aspect  of 


the  commission's  work,  and  publish  it  as  a  pamphlet  for  Michigan 
citizens  of  business  instinct  to  read — that  is,  if  the  commission  knows 
where  it  can  get  the  money  to  do  it. 

Turn  now  from  the  cost  of  tree-planting  and  the  value  of  trees 
grown  to  a  rapid  view  of  the  process  of  planting  and  taking  care  of 
plantations. 

The  state's  plantations  are  on  the  cut-over  pine  lands.  The  pine  was 
the  prevailing  occupant  of  the  territory.  Much  hardwood  there  was, 
of  course,  taking  the  whole  650,000  acres  of  Public  Domain  Commission 
territory  into  view.  Conifers,  the  "evergreens,"  grew  on  the  poorer 
lands,  however,  and  it  is  the  poor  lands  that  are  being  reclaimed  by 
the  commission. 

This  cuts  down  the  number  of  species  of  trees  dealt  with,  not  only 
to  t'he  cone-bearing  trees  but  it  cuts  down  the  conifers  to  four  species. 
They  are  three  natives  and  one  foreigner.  White  Pine,  Norway  (red) 
Pine  and  Jack  Pine  grew  on  these  worst  devastated  lands,  and  the 
White  and  Norway  were  the  especial  fruit  of  the  devastating  lumber- 
man's ax. 

FIRES  GET  PINE. 

They  grew  on  the  uplands  of  sand  or  sand  permeated  with  clay. 
In  the  lowlands  grew  many  other  varieties,  also  lumbered  off,  but  not 
so  cleanly  in  the  early  days  as  the  big  trees  of  the  plains  and  hills. 

Aiming  first  to  restock  the  worst  denuded  lands,  the  state  forester 
deals,  then,  with  the  native  White  Pine,  Norway  and  Jack  Pine.  Fires 
and  later  lumbermen  have  been  getting  the  Jack  Pine  which  the  earlier 
lumbermen  scorned. 

These  three  and  one  other  are  being  planted.  The  other  is  the 
Scotch  Pine.  It  nowhere  grows  native  in  this  country — it  is  unknown 
to  t'he  lumber  dealer.  It  is  of  the  general  nature  of  our  native  Jack 
Pine,  but  grows  somewhat  bulkier.  There  doesn't  seem  to  be  much 
choice  between  them,  as  to  timber  quality — both  are  inferior  to  White 
and  Norway,  prone  to  'limbage,"  and  consequently  full  of  knots  when 
sliced  by  the  saw.  Both  can,  and  now  do,  enter  into  the  making  of  pulp 
as  a  sort  of  adulterant  of  the  essential  Spruce,  and  both  can  be 
reckoned  on  for  lath,  box  boards  and  the  like. 

PROTECT  SWAMP  TREES. 

The  value  of  the  Scotch,  like  the  Jack  Pine  is  that  it  will  grow  on 
the  poorest  land.  That  makes  it  and  the  Jack  Pine  the  foremost  friend 
of  man — of  the  men  who  have  the  job  of  reclaiming  the  worst  of 
Michigan  land. 

White  Pine  is  planted  on  the  best  lands,  where  White  Pine  origin- 
ally grew;  Norway  with  it,  and  also  down  on  to  the  second  best  lands; 
and  Jack  and  Scotch  Pine  on  the  thinnest  lands.  That  is  the  general 
rule. 

No  Spruce  to  speak  of,  for  that  must  grow  on  better  lands  than  the 
White  Pine  requires.  No  hardwood,  for  essentially  the  same  reason. 
Lowland  and  swamp  trees  are  merely  being  protected  and  helped 
along  by  judicious  thinning — reclamation  in  these  cases  waits  on  re- 
clamation of  the  more  barren  areas. 

It  will  be  seen  that  the  reclamation  plan  of  the  state's  forestry 
department  is  modest,  while  it  is  nevertheless  gigantic.  The  amount 
that  needs  to  be  done  to  put  North  Michigan  back  on  a  timber  bearing 
basis  on  anything  approaching  the  old-time  scale  is  staggering  to  con- 
template,. 


NEED  GROWS  DA1LV. 

"But,"  the  reclamationists  rightly  argue,  "the  size  of  the  job  is  no 
argument  against  beginning  the  work.  Certainly  not  when  the  necessi- 
ties of  the  case  can  be  seen  to  be  daily  increasing,  as  well  as  the  mag- 
nitude of  the  work  of  catching  up.  We  can't  begin  sooner  than  now, 
and  we  can  speed  up  according  to  our  abilities  as  we  go  along." 

"According  to  our  abilities"  means  according  to  the  amount  of 
money  the  people  who  own  the  devastated  land,  the  Michigan  taxpayer, 
is  willing  to  invest  in  the  job  to  get  it  going  and  keep  it  going  until 
the  crop  begins  to  return  money  that  will  make  investment  on  capital 
account  no  longer  necessary. 

One  hundred  and  fifty  thousand  dollars  a  year  put  into  the  job 
would  mean  for  the  average  taxpayer  about  the  price  of  one  cheap 
cigar  each  year.  The  trouble  the  reclamationists  appear  to  be  in  is 
to  make  the  average  citizens  see  the  advantage  of  denying  himself  that 
one  cigar  a  year.  The  trouble  with  the  reclamationist  is  that  he  hasn't 
taken  the  public  by  the  ear  and  made  him  listen. 

The  public  will  have  an  ear  more  sensitive  to  the  argument  when  it 
knows  more  about  the  job  and  what  progress  is  being  made  by  the 
State  to  accomplish  it,  so  furnishing  an  example  for  other  land  owners 
to  follow.  This  leads  back  to  operations  on  the  state  forest  reserves, 
where  tree-planting  is  but  one  of  the  two  most  important  phases  of 
the  work.  And  this  leads  to  the  subjects  of  fire  lines,  fire  towers, 
telephone  system  in  the  forests  and  similar  matters.  They  will  be 
discussed  in  the  next  article. 


ARTICLE  IX 

A  long,  narrow  road,  a  mere  trail,  rises  in  a  sinuous  line  from  the 
Jack  Pine  plain,  in  the  Higgins  Lake  State  Forest  Reserve,  to  the  top 
of  a  hill  whereon  looms  against  the  sky  the  spidery  tracerv  of  a  watch 
tower. 

Sixty  feet  above  the  hilltop  and  far  above  tire  tops  of  trees  on  the 
hill  slopes  and  in  the  valleys,  on  the  square  platform  atop  the  tower,  a 
youth  in  a  vivid  red  sweater  was  lounging  on  the  rail  and  casting  his 
eyes  around  the  horizon.  This  was  on  a  Sunday  afternoon  a  few  weeks 
ago. 

The  season  was  far  enough  advanced  to  have  brought  on  the  early 
fire  period  in  the  forests.  Spring  is  the  worst  time  of  the  year;  for 
then  the  green  growth  has  not  started  and  on  the  ground  lies  dead  and 
dry  as  tinder  the  leaf  fall  of  the  year  just  past.  Michigan's  most  ex- 
pensive forest  fires  have  occurred  in  May.  It  is  true  that  the  fires  one 
hears  most  about  often  have  raged  in  summer  and  fall.  They  were  the 
spectacular  fires  occurring  where  tourists  go  and  where  newspaper 
correspondents  have  an  eye  trained  for  news.  The  fires  that  cost  Michi- 
gan the  most  money  have  burned  without  publicity. 

The  youth  in  the  red  sweater  knew  all  about  this,  as  does  every 
watchman,  ranger  and  day  laborer  on  the  Michigan  forest  reserves.  He 
was  watching  fires  burn  at  this  moment,  but  still  he  lounged,  impassive. 
There  was  smoke  all  around  the  horizon  to  the  southwest  and  the 
wind  was  coming  from  that  direction.  It  was  a  breeze  that  barely 
stirred  one's  coat  tails,  down  on  the  ground,  but  aloft  it  was  whistling 
through  the  wire  netting  of  the  watch  tower  guard  rail.  It  was  bringing 

—39— 


\ip  from  the  windward  areas  beyond  the  confines  of  the  Forest  reserva- 
tion a  thin  pall  of  smoke.  Higgins  Lake,  two  miles  behind  the  watch- 
man, but  looking  very  near  from  the  height  of  the  hill,  was  dimly  ob- 
scured. 

GUARDED  STATE  PROPERTY. 

The  watchman  worried  not  about  the  fires  beyond  the  state  forest 
limits,  only  watched  to  see  if  he  could  trace  progression  dangerously 
near  to  state  property.  So  the  afternoon  hours  drifted  along.  Sud- 
denly from  the  foot  of  the  tower  the  red  sweater  was  seen  coming 
down  one  steel  leg  of  the  structure,  where  loops  of  iron  rod  give  a 
foot  and  hand  hold.  He  went  into  a  booth  on  the  ground  inside  the 
tower,  a  shanty  like  the  ones  housing  the  telephones  along  an  inter- 
urban  railway  line.  He  got  headquarters  on  the  phone  and  reported 
smoke  inside  the  reservation.  He  gave"  an  approximate  location,  using 
a  jargon  that  sounded  like  a  surveyor's  statement. 

What  next  happened  could  not  be  seen  by  the  visitor,  even  by 
climbing  up  the  tower,  for  it  went  on  beneath  the  screen  of  inter- 
vening forests.  This,  however,  was  what  was  happening: 

An  automobile  loaded  with  men  and  tools  was  putting  out  from 
headquarters  several  miles  away  and  tearing  through  the  sand  roads 
toward  the  smudge  which  the  watchman  had  reported.  After  going 
two  or  three  miles  over  the  twisting  trails  it  struck  into  a  straight 
strip  of  clearing  that  looked  like  a  road  but  was  not — a  road  only  for 
forest  fire  fighters  going  at  top  speed  to  a  fire.  This  was  a  fire  line. 

Sixteen  feet  wide,  with  a  plowed  and  harrowed  strip  10*^  feet 
wide  through  the  center  of  them,  these  fire  lines  stretch  for  many 
miles  through  the  state  forest,  criss-crossing  in  geometrical  precision. 
They  are  run  on  section,  quarter-section  and  eighth-of-a-section  lines. 

It  is  told  of  a  Russian  Czar  that,  asked  what  route  he  would  be 
pleased  to  have  the  then  projected  railway  from  St.  Petersburg  to 
Moscow  follow,  he  laid  a  ruler  on  the  map  between  the  two  cities, 
drew  a  line  along  the  ruler  and  said:  "Put  it  there." 

TRACTOR  DOES  THE  WORK.  / 

That  is  how  the  state  forester  runs  his  fire  lines.  Over  hill  and 
down  dale  they  go,  skipping  the  swamps,  never  rounding  them.  On 
the  Higgins  Lake  and  nearby  reserves  a  -huge  caterpillar  tractor  does 
the  work,  tearing  out  small  trees  and  stumps,  plowing  the  middle 
strip  and  keeping  it  harrowed.  Elsewhere  the  work  is  done  by 
horse-drawn  equipment. 

The  automobile  with  the  men  and  tools  came  upon  the  tiny  fire  in 
the  grass  near  a  point  where  a  fire  line  crossed  a  highway.  Perhaps 
somebody  going  past  in  an  automobile  had  emptied  a  pipe  or  thrown 
out  a  cigar  butt  as  he  jogged  past  this  spot.  From  the  fire  line  the 
"smoke  chasers"  brought  shovelsful  of  sand  and  smothered  out  the 
fire.  It  had  gotten  into  the  base  of  a  dry  old  stump.  They  filled  the 
crevices  of  the  stump  with  fine  sand;  and  the  fire,  out,  had  to  stay  out. 

That  is  the  forest  fire  fighter's  material  for  fighting— dirt.  That  is 
the  explanation  of  the  16-foot  fire  lines  and  the  lO^-foot  plowed  strip 
along  their  centers. 

When  the  forest  fire  fighter  has  to  plunge  into  an  unbroken 
wilderness  of  brush  to  cope  with  an  incipient  blaze  by  blanketing  it 
out  or  by  starting  controllable  backfires  to  starve  it  out,  he  works 
under  a  terrific  handicap.  By  the  time  he  gets  ground  broken  and 
earth  available  the  small  blaze  may  have  gotten  beyond  control.  When 

—40- 


there  is  a  plowed  fire  line  near  he  can  at  once  get  busy  on  the  main  job. 

Some  people  of  eminent  position  still  carry  the  notion  that  fire  lines 
are  run  with  the  idea  that  they  stop  the  spread  of  fires  by  interposing 
an  area  from  which  combustible  material  has  been  removed.  They  do 
stop  grass  fires,  but  woods  fires  leap  a  16-foot  barrier  with  awesome 
ease. 

The  theory  of  the  fire  line  is  that  it  serves  as  a  ready-made  base 
of  operations  for  the  fire  fighter — and  the  theory  works  out,  as  one 
can  see  for  himself  by  looking  at  burnt-over  tracts.  Only  a  few  weeks 
ago  a  10-acre  fire  that  started  in  one  of  the  oldest  plantations  on  the 
Higgins  Lake  Reserve  burned  up  to  a  fire  line  for  a  long  stretch 
along  the  line,  and  there  the  ground  was  black  and  tree  trunks  charred. 
Sixteen  feet  away,  on  the  other  side  of  the  line,  stretched  the  forest 
without  a  trace  of  having  been  scorched. 

ONLY  ONE  FOREST  EQUIPPED. 

A  complete  fire  line  system  for  the  state's  forests,  in  the  plans  of 
the  Public  Domain  Commission,  comprehends  a  line  along  the' 
boundaries  of  "every  40-acre  tract  within  the  reserve.  But  one  forest 
has  been  thus  completely  equipped  to  date,  but  it  is  the  only  forest 
reserve  in  the  United  States  that  is.  This  is  the  Fyfe  Lake  Reserve 
of  7,182  acres  area,  1,202  acres  planted.  The  fire  line  mileage  criss- 
crossing this  forest  totals  105  miles. 

It  costs  from  $100  to  $150  a  mile  to  run  fire  lines  in  the  state's 
forests.  It  would  cost  about  the  same  were  it  conceivable  to  run  fire 
lines  through  the  vast  areas  of  fire  country  outside  the  reserves.  The 
total  would  run  into  many  millions,  even  were  the  section  lines  only 
followed.  Nobody  thinks  of  such  a  thing.  Slash  disposal  and  running 
of  fire  lines  "to  break  up  the  most  dangerous  areas  of  slash,"  as 
Filibert  Roth  has  put  it,  is  the  most  in  contemplation.  When  forests 
actually  are  set  on  the  barrens,  in  the  years  to  come,  they  doubtless 
will  be  protected  by  section  and  quarter-section  lines. 

The  regulation  forest  fire  fighting  organization  contemplates 
watchmen,  patrolmen  and  smoke  chasers.  Watchmen  in  towers  or 
stationed  on  hilltops  spot  smoke  clouds  and  report.  Patrolmen  go 
about  looking  for  fires,  educating  people  on  fire  prevention  and 
enforcing  the  fire  laws.  Smoke  chasers  go  after  the  fires  and  put 
them  out,  calling  in  help  when  needed.  The  tools  of  the  fire  fighters 
are  watch  towers,  telephone  lines,  grubhooks  and  shovels,  and  fire 
lines. 

There  is  at  least  one  watch-tower  in  each  of  the  opened  state 
forests,  in  three  of  them  two  towers  each.  These  last  are  Houghton 
Lake,  Lake  Superior  and  Presque  Isle.  Phone  lines  from  each  com- 
municate with  the  custodian's  office  in  that  particular  forest,  and 
thence  to  the  outer  world.  It  costs  $100  a  mile  to  put  up  these 
telephone  equipments,  where  poles  have  to  be  erected.  In  some  of 
the  forests  the  lines  hook  up  with  other  systems — as  on  Lake  Superior 
Reserve,  where  there  are  arrangements  wit'h  the  United  States  Life- 
Saving  Station  on  the  Lake  Superior  shore  within  the  limits  of  the 
state  reservation. 

STATE  HAS  DIFFICULTIES. 

How  much  of  the  system  in  practice  on  the  state  reservations  is 
applicable  for  the  protection  of  natural  growth  and  the  propagation 
©f  replaced  growth  on  the  millions  of  state-owned  and  private-owned 
outside  the  reserves,  the  reader  can  easily  figure  out  for  himself,  with 

—41— 


one  or  two  hints  to  guide  his  calculations.  Matters  of  legality  came 
into  the  reckoning.  The  status  of  state-owned  and  private-owned 
lands,  in  respect  to  protection  costs,  naturally  differ.  So  does  the 
fire  line  question,  for  it  is  one  thing  for  the  state  to  go  out  for  a 
day's  work  on  its  own  land,  ripping  things  up,  and  quite  another 
thing  when  the  ripping  is^to  be  done  on  private  land. 

The  state  has  its  self-imposed  handicaps.  The  Public  Domain 
Commission  has  to  get  money  from  the  Legislature  to  carry  out  a 
comprehensive,  forward-looking  scheme;  but  it  is  easy  to  'perceive, 
on  examination,  that  existing  laws  put  upon  private  persons  sortie 
handicaps  in  the  way  of  restoration  of  barren  acres  to  wealth 
production  that  the  state  has  not  set  up  in  its  own  pathway.  , 

One  of  these  is  the  Timber  Tax  Law.  This  matter  is  important 
when  the  effort  to  get  private  interests  into  this  great  enterprise  pf 
restoring  the  bankrupt  acres  to  wealth  production  is  in  mind.  It  will 
be  given  first  consideration  in  the  following  articles,  which  will  then 
point  out  a  plan  at  this  moment  running  through  the  minds  of  many 
people,  whereby,  if  it  desired  to  do  so,  the  state  could  take  the  most 
threatening  and  neglected  of  privately-owned  lands  into  its  own  hands 
and  incorporate  them  in  the  development  area  it  has  laid  out  for  its 
own  activities. 


ARTICLE  X. 

Restoration  to  Michigan's  10,000,000  bankrupt  and  near-bankrupt 
acres  of  cut-over  pine  lands  of  a  permanent  forest  industry  that  will 
make  these  lands  once  more  productive  of  wealth,  rebuild  decaying 
North  Michigan  towns  and  furnish  auxiliary  support  for  agricultural 
industry  in  a  region  where  markets  are  scattered  wide  and  labor  too 
often  can  not  find  the  winter  employment  with  which  to  eke  out  the 
scanty  livelihood  which  pioneer  farms  in  the  sand  country  afford — 
all  this  is  involved  as  a  prospect  in  the  activities  reflected  in  the 
beginnings  that  are  being  made  by  the  Public  Domain  Commission 
on  the  state's  reserved  forest  lands. 

Private  owners  of  large  tracts  have  begun  to  show  interest  in  the 
scheme,  but  they  have  not  gone  very  far.  Nothing  is  known  in 
Michigan  comparable  to  the  organized  -activities  of  one  of  the  big 
paper-making  corporations  over  in  Quebec,  on  the  St.  Maurice  River. 
There  a  combination  of  pulp  mill  interests  that  controls  15,000  square 
miles  of  timber  land  has  a  nursery  for  production  of  white  spruce 
seedlings.  Planting  is  going  on,  it  is  claimed,  at  the  rate  of  more 
than  1,000,000  trees  a  year.  Michigan's  forestry  department  plants 
about  3,000,000  each  year.  The  only  Michigan  corporation  heard  of 
as  interested  in  this  work  on  a  comparable  scale  is  a  mining  corpora- 
tion in  the  Upper  Peninsula  which  has  been  lately  inquiring  for  prices 
on  seedling  trees  in  million  lots. 

SEEDLINGS  AT  COSTS. 

"We  can  furnish  1,000,000  seedlings  a  year,"  said  A.  K.  Chittenden, 
head  of  the  forestry  department  of  the  Michigan  Agricultural  College. 
"We  gave  this  company  a  quotation  a  year  ago,  but  have  heard 
nothing  from  them  since." 

M.  A.  C,  like  the  state  nursery  at  Higgins  Lake,  sells  seedlings 
at  cost.  The  college  nursery  of  29  acres  supplies  seedlings  for  sand 

-42- 


land  owned  by  the  college  up  north  and  does  a  big  businesss  in 
promoting  propagation  o'f  trees  in  farmers'  wood  lots  and  along 
public  highways  all  over  the  state. 

"The  trouble,  when  you  come  to  consider  private  interests  in 
relation  to  the  problem  of  re-clothing  idle  lands  with  forests,"  said 
Orlando  F.  Barnes,  of  the  State  Tax  Commission,  "is  that  timber 
yields  no  income  to  the  owner  until  separated  from  the  soil.  The 
owners  are  under  constant  pressure  to  cut  and  market.  There  is  a 
constantly  increasing  tax  burden,  with  no  similar  annual  income  to 
*  meet  it.  Michigan  forests  are  taxed  as  real  estate.  The  increase  in 
value  of  the  trees  is  taxed  each  year,  while  the  harvest  waits.  It  must 
wait  for  many  years. 

TIMBER  HARVEST  WAITS. 

"The  premise  is  a  false  one.  The  supposition  is  that  the  forest  has 
but  one  year's  life,  like  the  ordinary  crop  of  a  farmer.  Farm  crops 
aren't  even  taxed,  direct.  The  land  is  taxed  according  to  its  crop  rais- 
ing capabilities  as  proved  by  the  yields  from  year  to  year.  We  don't 
tax  the  corn  and  the  wheat  as  it  stands  on  the  land,  but  we  4°  tax 
'the  timber.  While  the  harvest  with  which  to  pay  the  tax  bills  waits, 
from  30  to  75  years  as  the  case  may  be,  the  owner  must  pay  from  year 
to  year.  He  must  get  the  money  from  some  other  source.  Not  only 
that,  but  interest  on  the  outlay  compounds  at  a  staggering  rate. 

"Land  and  timber  should  be  exempted  from  the  annual  ad  valorem 
property  tax,  and  there  should  be  substituted  for  it  a  percentage  tax 
payable  whenever  any  part  of  the  timber  crop  is  harvested.  This 
should  be  modified  by  an  annual  land  tax  at  a  fixed  rate  upon  the  land 
valued  as  stump  land,  along  with  a  yield  tax  when  the  timber  is  cut. 
There  must  be  a  fixed  land  tax  collected  annually,  for  the  counties  in 
which  these  lands  are  located  must  have  their  revenue." 

CAN'T  AFFORD   TREE-PLANTING. 

This  explains,  in  outline,  statements  which  have  been  made  to  the 
inquirer  among  owners  of  large,  unused  areas  in  the  bankrupt  lancf 
area.  The  question  was  asked:  "Why  don't  you  re-establish  the 
forests  on  these  lands?" 

The  answer  always  is:  "Because  we  can't  afford  to  do  it  when  the 
state  taxes  us  to  death"— a  statement  never  made  clear  by  them,  but 
~ow  explained  by  the, state  tax  commissioner. 

Among  residents  of  the  North  country  there  is  to  this  day  a  fixed 
antagonism  to  any  scheme  that  contemplates  easement  of  the  tax  bur- 
den on  these  lands.  The  counties  need  the  money.  The  fact  that 
3,00  acres  a  month  revert  to  the  state  for  non-payment  of  taxes  doesn't 
tend  to  loosen  the  local  grip.  There  is,  however,  now  evident  and  be- 
coming yearly  more  evident,  a  conviction  that  fire  damage  wrought  by 
conflagrations  starting  in  slash  lands  can  not  be  brought  into  bounds 
without  some  action  that  will  give  the  state  and  its  fire-fighting  and 
tree-planting  organizations  more  direct  control  over  private  lands  than 
they  now  have.  It  is  useless  to  expect  owners  of  charred  and  devas- 
tated sand  plains  to  do  anything  effective.  That  is  the  conviction 
among  thinking  men  in  the  northern  counties. 

GETTING  TOGETHER. 

A  proposal  has  bobbed  up  in  agricultural  circles.  It  is  there,  indeed, 
that  something  might  have  been  expected  to  occur.  The  fact  that  ag- 

—43— 


f< 

-• 


riculturists  have  a  plan  for  control  of  the  forest  fire  menace  at  the  same 
time  serves  to  point  out  an  important  fact — which  is  that  interests 
which  hitherto  have  been  at  variance  are  at  last  coming  together. 
Farmers  are  beginning  to  get  in  on  the  foresters'  problem,  in  a  helpful 
way,  at  least  hereabouts,  that  is,  in  the  area  of  the  Lake  States. 

The  Northwest  Michigan  Development  Bureau,  with  headquarters 
at  Traverse  City,  in  the  general  location  where  have  occurred  the 
worst  of  the  Lower  Peninsula  forest  fires  of  recent  date,  adopted  at 
one  of  its  meetings  not  long  ago  a  set  of  resolutions  calling  for  state 
control  and  administration  of  the  worst  of  the  slash  lands. 

"Thousands  of  acres  of  cut-over  land  lying  idle  in  Michigan  are  a 
menace  to  surrounding  lands.  They  are  a  breeding  place  for  grass- 
hoppers and  are  fire  traps,"  say  these  agriculturists;  and  when  they 
speak  of  fire  they  have  the  full  accord  of  Upper  Peninsula  men  on 
grazing  lands,  whose  flocks  and  herds  have  been  driven  many  miles  at 
times  by  fire,  often  perishing. 

PASTURAGE  SUGGESTED. 

Say   the    Northwestern   Michigan    agriculturists:    "It   is   possible   to 
handle    these    lands    in    such    a    manner    that    all    lands    suitable    to. 
reforestation   could  be   planted  and   cared  for;   and  all  lands   suitable 
for  pasturage  could  be  used  for  that  purpose. 

"Cut-over  pine  lands  not  owned  by  the  state  could  be  condemned, 
a  just  value  placed  by  a  competent  board  of  appraisers  and  the  owners 
reimbursed.  This  should  be  done  only  when  a  majority  of  the  free- 
holders of  a  township  or  a  county  request  it.  The  township  or  county 
requesting  such  action  by  4;he  state  could  agree  to  keep  the  fire  lines 
open,  the  initial  cost  to  be  borne  by  the  state.  The  township  or 
county  could  also  agree  to  maintain  a  fire  warden. 

The  shrewd  policy  dictating  this  proposal  mayliot  at  first  appear  to 
the  general  reader.  Here  is  a  proposition,  not  for  the  state  to  step  on 
to  private  lands,  perhaps  at  the  behest  of  a  state  forestry  department 
which  wants  acres  allotted  to  it  for  free  planting,  but  for  communities 
themselves  to  put  the  first  stigma  of  non-agricultural  availability  and 
existing  menace  upon  private  property — the  state  to  accede  to  the 
proposition  only  on  proofs  arising  among  the  people  who  know  the 
lands  as  neighbors  and  naturally  would  be  interested  in  seeing  the  land 
exploited  for  agriculture,  if  there  were  any  hope  of  that  outcome. 

PRIVILEGE  TO  COUNTY. 

"In  order  to  furnish  an  incentive  for  a  township  or  county  to  make 
such  a  request  (for  condemnation),"  the  north  country  men  continue, 
"the  state  could  agree  to  reforest  such  land  as  would  be  suitable  for 
reforestation  and  give  the  township  or  county  the  privilege  of 
pasturing  cattle  on  the  land.  This  would  be  a  great  boon  for  the  live 
stock  industry,  as  the  live  stock  men  would  be  reasonably  sure  that 
fires  would  not  destroy  their  pastures  in  the  middle  of  the  season." 

North  Michigan  live  stock  men  are  taking  a  leaf  from  the  book  of 
the  western  herdsmen.  First  fighting  forest  conservation,  these  latter 
finally  became  reconciled  to  grazing  fees  on  Federal  forest  lands, 
finally  finding,  by  all  accounts,  that  the  forest  conservation  "cranks" 
were  actually  working  to  the  stockmen's  advantage.  Grazing  fees  pay 
a  large  part  of  the  forest  activities  on  Government  lands  in  the  West. 

"Making  the  township  or  county  a  co-operator  would  insure  a 
greater  measure  of  success  than  would  be  possible  in  a  state  under- 
taking," conclude  the  North  Michigan  men.  "It  might  be  made 
compulsory  for  a  township  or  county  having  a  certain  percentage  of 

—44— 


its  land  either  wild  or  cut-over  to  take  such  action." 

As  a  mere  unofficial,  voluntary  proposal  for  state  legislation 
calculating  to  cope  with  phases  of  an  enormous  problem,  here  is  a 
suggestion  concrete  and  plausible  enough  for  anybody,  on  the  face 
of  it.  It  seems  to  make  suggestively  practicable  Prof.  Roth's  demand 
that  "the  worst  and  most  threatening  area  of  slash  lands  be  broken 
up"  as  a  fire  protection  measure. 

"CUT  SLASH  TO  GROUND/' 

The  state's  laws  regarding  slash  disposal  need  to  be  worked  out  to 
more  definite  and  practical  conclusions  than  now  provided  for.  This 
needs  to  be  done  if  farmers  and  ranchmen  are  to  be  properly  protected 
and  if  the  state's  forests  are  to  be  protected  without  disproportionate 
cost.  Two  years  ago  fires  coming  up  out  of  the  slash  lands  burned 
over  farms  and  waste  places  in  the  area  of  Higgins  Laks  reserve  until 
they  had  come  up  to  a  line  22  miles  long,  which  is  within  two  miles  of 
the  total  of  the  line  bounding  t'he  forest.  Some  of  them  got  into  the 
forest  and  were  there  controlled. 

''Slash  shouldn't  be  disposed  of  by  being  burned,"  said  State  Forest- 
er Schaaf.  "I  don't  believe  in  destroying  anything.  Slash  should  be 
cut  down  to  the  ground.  There  it  is  far  less  liable  to  spread  fire,  and 
soon  it  rots  away,  going  back  into  the  soil  which  needs  it." 

What  has  been  said  earlier  in  these  articles  on  matters  of  required 
appropriations  for  work  will  have  to  suffice,  as  suggesting  legislation. 
This  includes  what  Mr.  Lovejoy  has  so  clearly  expounded  regarding 
the  necessities  of  a  land  survey,  to  go  hand  in  hand  with  reclamation 
activities  and  to  give  direction  to  replanting  effort  and  the  expenditure 
of  funds  for.  fire  protection. 

A  large  subject  remains — the  explanation  of  what  reforestation  of 
these  barren  lands  will  mean  to  industrial  Michigan  and  the  life  of 
dwellers  in  North  Michigan  towns,  as  also  t'he  lives  of  people  who  only 
occasionally  visit  the  north  country.  Those  things  "will  have  to  await 
treatment  at  another  time. 


—45— 


THE 

AMERICAN  FORESTRY 
ASSOCIATION 

presents  this  series  pf  articles  from 
the  DETROIT  NEWS  as  a  fine  exam- 
ple of  one  paper's  campaign  for  keep- 
ing the  importance  of  forestry  before 
the  public.  Will  you  not  take  up  the 
question,  one  big  phase  of  which, 

THE  COST  OF  PRINT  PAPER 

is  so  important  to  you?  We  thank 
you  for  your  co-operation  with  us  and 
hope  you  will  find,  in  this  little  book, 
subject  matter  for  continuing  that  co- 
operation. We  must  save  our  forests. 


The 
American  Forestry  Association 

1 214  Sixteenth  St.  N.  W.        Washington,  D.  C. 


